# What is Incident?

> An unplanned disruption or degradation of a service that needs an urgent response.

Canonical: https://www.decimal.app/glossary/incident · Last reviewed: 2026-09-23

An incident is any event that interrupts or degrades a service for customers, from a full outage to a slow API. Incidents are declared, assigned a severity, and managed until resolved.

## Why it matters

Incidents create ticket spikes. Support needs to recognize them quickly, link related tickets, and give customers consistent updates.

## Best practices

1. Connect support to incident tooling. So agents see active incidents before replying.
2. Use one parent ticket. Link all affected customers to it.
3. Communicate on a cadence. Update the status page even when there's no news.

## How Decimal helps

Decimal checks incident tools like PagerDuty and incident.io during an investigation, so tickets tied to an active incident are recognized right away.

## Related terms

- [Severity Level](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/severity-level): A rating of how much harm an issue is causing, from outage to cosmetic.
- [Status Page](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/status-page): A public page reporting current service health and active incidents.
- [Postmortem](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/postmortem): A blameless review of what went wrong and how to prevent it recurring.
- [On-Call](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/on-call): The rotation of engineers responsible for responding to urgent issues.
- [Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/mttr): The average time from when an issue is reported to when it's fixed.

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