Timing is often a surprise, and that’s the hallmark of a major incident.

An unexpected guest arrives at the door, unannounced and a bit loud. In the realm of IT and services, that guest is a major incident. The moment it shows up, everything changes. Screens glow, dashboards flash, and the calm you had a minute ago evaporates. The characteristic that most defines a major incident? Timing is often a surprise.

What makes a major incident different from the rest?

You’ve probably handled glitches before—bugs, hiccups, something not quite right. Those are annoying, sure, but they don’t usually rewrite the day. A major incident, by contrast, arrives with a jolt. It disrupts service, hits customer experience, and drags the whole organization into a heightened state. The key feature is not the duration, but the timing: it tends to come out of nowhere, demanding urgent attention and rapid, coordinated action.

Let me explain with a simple frame. Imagine your service is a car on a quiet highway. A minor fault might be a hiccup in the fuel gauge. A major incident is a sudden engine warning that lights up the dashboard, the steering tightens, and traffic around you keeps moving just enough to remind you how exposed you are. The clock starts ticking the moment the alert hits, and there’s no way to pretend it isn’t happening.

Timing is the driver, not a backdrop

Why does timing matter so much? Because when an incident hits, it’s not just about fixing a line of code. It’s about minimizing downtime, preserving data integrity, and keeping customers from feeling like they’ve fallen off a cliff. The surprise element makes it unpredictable. You can’t schedule a major incident for 2:03 p.m. on a Tuesday and have everything prepped. You can, however, build a response that feels almost automatic because the patterns are familiar.

That urgency cascades into every corner of the organization. If your outage affects billing, a latency spike harms customer trust. If your payment gateway slows down, your sales team faces a flood of calls. The timing nudges teams to move fast, communicate clearly, and check assumptions at the door. This isn’t about heroic one-person saves; it’s about a well-coordinated orchestra where the conductor knows the score and the musicians know their cues.

How cross-functional teamwork comes into play

A major incident doesn’t respect silos. It tests the entire system: engineering, product, security, communications, and even legal and compliance teams when relevant. The moment the first alert rings, the on-call engineer might reach out to a few domain experts for quick containment. Then they loop in the right people—the product owner, the database administrator, the network engineer, perhaps the site reliability engineers—until each critical area is covered.

This is where a dependable incident management workflow shines. The fastest responders don’t wait for a formal memo; they follow an established escalation path, adjust on the fly, and keep stakeholders in the loop. In practice, that means a clear incident timeline, defined roles (incident commander, technical leads, communications liaison), and a shared playbook that travels with the team.

Where PagerDuty fits in

If you’ve worked with PagerDuty, you already know it acts like the nervous system of incident response. It routes alerts based on schedules and on-call rotations, so the right person sees the right alert at the right time. It helps you escalate when the first response isn’t enough and keeps a running timeline of what happened, who did what, and when. It also supports post-incident learning by gathering incident records, metrics, and outcomes in one place.

Here’s the practical side. When timing is a surprise, you want to minimize search time and maximize action time. PagerDuty’s incident timeline shows you the sequence of events, who acknowledged the alert, what changes were made, and when. That visibility reduces back-and-forth and helps you validate containment faster. And with cross-team notification, you can pull in the people you need without chasing them down through chat messages or emails that get buried.

A moment to reflect on the human element

Let’s not pretend fault-finding is the goal here. A major incident stirs up anxiety—within you, within your teammates, and sometimes within your customers. The human side matters as much as the technical side. The best responders stay calm under pressure, communicate decisions clearly, and acknowledge uncertainty when needed. A quick check-in to say, “We’ve got this; here’s what we’re changing now,” can steady the room more than a long email chain.

It’s okay to feel the pressure. The trick is to channel it into focus. Short, decisive updates beat long, speculative threads. And yes, it helps to have a few rituals: a brief check-in cadence, a rotating incident commander, and a go-to template for customer status updates. These are not about stifling creativity; they’re about preserving clarity when the clock is loud.

Real-world rhythms you might recognize

Think of a major incident as a fire drill you actually need. You practice to build muscle memory, then you hope to never have to use it at full flame. The timing surprise—this is what keeps you awake at 2 a.m.—forces you to rely on established routines rather than improvisation. The better your routines, the faster you can transition from spotting the problem to stabilizing the service.

We all know situations where a sudden surge in traffic hits a site and a database slows to a crawl. The moment right after the alert, you pivot from “What’s broken?” to “What can we do right now to keep customers online?” The most effective responders move through that pivot with speed and precision: triage the most urgent issues, contain the blast radius, communicate with customers, then start the long work of restoring full stability.

From a reliability perspective, this is where tradeoffs appear. Do you shut down a feature temporarily to protect the rest of the system, or do you try to patch on the fly and risk introducing new problems? The timing of decisions matters just as much as the decisions themselves. You want to avoid hasty, brittle fixes that will break again when pressure rises. Instead, you aim for steady, verifiable containment and a plan to return to normal operations safely.

Best practices you can adopt without turning your world upside down

You don’t need a big reshuffle to improve your incident response. Small, disciplined changes can yield big gains when timing is unpredictable.

• Clear roles and a lightweight runbook: Define who does what, and rehearse the first 15 minutes. A known sequence reduces hesitation and miscommunication.

• Reliable alerting and routing: Ensure alerts reach the right people, not a noisy inbox. Use escalation policies so nothing slips through the cracks.

• Transparent communication: Use a single channel for incident updates, and keep language simple. Customers and teammates should always know what’s happening and why.

• Real-time dashboards: Have live visibility into service health, traffic patterns, and error rates. The sooner you see the trend, the sooner you act.

• Post-incident review that’s actually useful: Gather what happened, what worked, and what didn’t. Turn those findings into practical changes, not a stack of memoranda.

• Practice with real-world scenarios: Simulated incidents aren’t just theater; they’re rehearsal for real-time decisions under pressure.

A quick note on myths to watch out for

There’s a temptation to think that major incidents are all about heroic engineering feats. In reality, great incident response is as much about process and communication as it is about code. Timing is the unexpected guest, but the party’s success depends on how well you coordinate the response, how quickly you inform stakeholders, and how reliably you can return to steady state. So don’t assume a slick fix alone will save the day. It’s the combination of containment, clear updates, and a solid recovery plan that makes the difference.

Closing thought: resilience is a team sport

If there’s one takeaway about major incidents, it’s this: timing is often a surprise, but your response doesn’t have to be. Build a culture where teams anticipate the unexpected, where the on-call experience is structured, and where tools like PagerDuty help you see and act with clarity. When the next surprise arrives, you’ll find that your organization isn’t caught off guard so much as ready to respond, adapt, and recover with confidence.

So, what does this mean for you today? Start by mapping your incident response in plain terms: who leads when the alarm sounds, who communicates with customers, and what the first containment steps are. Then test those steps with a light-but-real scenario. If timing is the surprise, practice with the intention of making that surprise feel a little less loud. A calm, coordinated response is the real antidote to the chaos that major incidents bring.

If you’re building a PagerDuty-enabled workflow, think of it as the nervous system that keeps the body moving when a storm hits. Alerts become signals; on-call rotations become the backbone; and the incident timeline becomes the story you tell to your teammates and your customers. The goal isn’t perfection in the first minute of chaos. It’s a dependable rhythm: see the warning, act decisively, inform clearly, and recover with grace.

And yes, the next major incident will arrive unannounced, just like clockwork. But with a well-tuned crew, crisp roles, and the right tools in place, you can turn that surprise into a managed transition rather than a crisis. That’s the essence of resilience in the modern era of digital services—and it’s exactly what great PagerDuty Incident Responders aim to deliver every day.