# What is an incident?

DevFeed: [What is an incident?](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/what-is-an-incident-12071.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://incident.io/blog/what-is-an-incident>)

Author: Stephen Whitworth

Published: 2021-07-06T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The incident.io Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-incident-io-blog.md>)

Topics: [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident.md>), [incident management](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident-management.md>), [Incident response](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident-response.md>)

Tags: [customers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/customers.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [incident-channel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-channel.md>), [incident-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-management.md>), [incident-response](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-response.md>), [operational](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/operational.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [post-mortem](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/post-mortem.md>), [processes](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/processes.md>), [slack-incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/slack-incident.md>)

## AI overview

This article explains how organizations can determine whether a problem qualifies as an incident. It presents practical criteria, including potential negative impact, urgent response, cross-team coordination, stakeholder communication, and the need for later review. It also argues that lower thresholds help organizations build an incident response culture and learn from smaller failures.

## Source excerpt

In a world where things go wrong in organizations all of the time, what should our threshold be for defining an incident?