IT System Outage Incident Report

IT System Outage Incident Report Template

When critical systems go down, having a structured incident reporting process is essential for IT teams, MSPs, and businesses that depend on reliable technology infrastructure. This IT System Outage Incident Report template helps you document every outage thoroughly—from initial detection through root cause analysis and recovery—ensuring you learn from each incident and improve system resilience over time.

Why IT teams need structured outage reporting

System outages are inevitable, but chaos doesn't have to be. A standardised incident report template ensures your team captures consistent, actionable data during and after every outage. This template guides you through documenting affected services, timeline details, root cause analysis, and business impact assessment—giving you the foundation for better incident response, clearer communication with stakeholders, and stronger post-incident reviews.

Built for IT professionals and service providers

Whether you're an IT manager at a mid-sized company, part of a DevOps team, running an MSP, or managing infrastructure for multiple clients, this template adapts to your needs. It's designed to capture technical details without overwhelming non-technical stakeholders, and the conditional logic ensures you only see relevant follow-up questions based on severity and impact.

IT support teams, network administrators, system engineers, and operations managers can use this form immediately after an outage is resolved—or during recovery if you need to log information in real time and update it later.

What this template covers

The form walks through key incident reporting stages: incident identification (time detected, severity, priority), affected systems and services, business impact assessment, root cause analysis, recovery timeline and actions taken, stakeholder communication, and prevention recommendations. You can track which services were down, how many users were affected, whether workarounds were implemented, and what steps will prevent recurrence.

This level of detail is invaluable for building a knowledge base of past incidents, identifying patterns, and demonstrating accountability to senior leadership or external clients.

Streamline follow-up with workflow automation

Once you've logged an outage report in Paperform, you can connect it to your broader IT operations stack. Use Stepper (stepper.io) to automatically create follow-up tasks in your project management tool, notify stakeholders via Slack or email, update your internal wiki or knowledge base, and trigger post-incident review meetings. You can also route high-severity incidents directly to senior leadership or compliance teams, ensuring nothing critical slips through the cracks.

With Paperform's native integrations, outage reports can sync to tools like Jira, ServiceNow, Notion, Airtable, or Google Sheets—keeping your incident log up to date without manual data entry.

Secure, compliant, and ready to scale

Paperform is SOC 2 Type II compliant, with robust security controls, data residency options, and SSO—so you can confidently use it for sensitive IT incident reporting. Whether you're managing a small internal IT team or supporting multiple enterprise clients as an MSP, Paperform scales with you.

Start documenting outages more effectively, improve your incident response process, and build a stronger, more resilient IT environment with this ready-to-use template.