This procedure outlines how the UMAC Web Strategy team identifies and responds to web‑related emergencies that impact the availability, performance, or visibility of University of Washington websites. It defines what qualifies as an emergency, establishes who should be contacted in urgent situations, and describes the escalation path when immediate response is needed. The guideline ensures timely communication and action during critical incidents while directing routine issues through standard support channels to protect team capacity and maintain effective operations.
This procedure applies to:
- All staff in University Marketing and Communications (UMAC) and University Advancement (UA)
- All UW faculty, staff, students, visitors who use the University of Washington’s (UW) main website and/or the websites hosted and/or maintained by UMAC
Definitions
Definition of an “emergency”
An emergency, in this context, is a situation that requires immediate attention and action due to its impact on the availability, performance, or visibility of UW websites, including the main university homepage and websites hosted by and/or maintained by UMAC. Emergencies may occur during or outside of standard business hours.
Examples of emergencies
- The UW homepage is not responding or is down
- A website hosted by UMAC is extremely slow or timing out
- Posting emergency or disaster communications
- Publishing urgent public safety messages
- Responding to time-sensitive notices or directives
- Promoting major institutional announcements (e.g., Nobel Prize recognition)
- A software defect that would prevent someone from accessing a critical business need and/or during a critical time (e.g., the link to the admissions application is broken during the time the application is open)
- Responding to urgent requests from leadership (Assistant Vice Presidents and Assistant Vice Provosts, Associate Vice Presidents and Associate Vice Provosts, Vice Presidents and Vice Provosts, Senior Vice Presidents, Executive Vice Presidents, Chancellors, President, Regents, and their support staff)
Examples of non-emergencies
These issues, while important, do not require immediate action and should be submitted via standard support channels:
- Broken links
- Typos or grammatical errors
- Missing or incorrect imagery
- Routine content updates
- Requests to update text or links that do not fit the examples of an emergency
- Layout shifts
- Bugs or other code updates that do not affect the ability to access a website and retrieve information from a website
Roles and responsibilities
Director, Web Strategy
The Director of Web Strategy is the primary point of contact for emergencies, triaging the emergency to the appropriate person on the team, communicating the status of the emergency, and/or escalating the emergency to gain resolution.
Associate Director, Web and Mobile Operations
The Associate Director of Web and Mobile Operations serves as the backup to the Director of Web Strategy when they are unable to respond to an emergency.
Assistant Vice President, Digital Strategy
The Assistant Vice President of Digital Strategy serves as the escalation point if members of the Web Strategy team are unable to respond to an emergency.
Procedure steps
Non-emergencies
Please report non-emergencies to the Web Strategy team via email at uweb@uw.edu. This will route your request to the team’s helpdesk where it will be triaged to a member of the team and addressed during regular business hours within our service level agreement.
Emergencies
In an emergency, send a Microsoft Teams message to the Director of Web Strategy as soon as the emergency is discovered. In the message, be sure to state the kind of emergency, where the emergency is occurring, the steps that were taken to discover the emergency and any additional, relevant information that would help in the resolution of the emergency.
The Director of Web Strategy will then follow the procedure in “Service Model (WS-PROC-1002)” to triage the issue, communicate the updates to addressing the issue, including leadership, and/or escalating the issue.
If there is no response within 15 minutes, escalate via text message to the Director of Web Strategy (if you do not have their phone number, please ask a member of the Web Strategy team to text them on your behalf).
If the Director is out of the office, unresponsive, or otherwise unavailable or unable to respond to the emergency, or after 30 minutes have elapsed, please contact the Associate Director of Web and Mobile Operations in their absence.
If the Director, Associate Director, or another member of the Web Strategy team has not responded to your request within 45 minutes, please contact the Assistant Vice President for Digital Strategy.
No on-call rotation
The Web Strategy Team does not maintain a formal on-call schedule. However, the above protocol ensures that urgent matters are addressed promptly and responsibly.
Respecting boundaries
Please use discretion when determining whether a situation qualifies as an emergency. This helps protect the well-being of our team while ensuring that critical issues are handled appropriately.
- Procedure ID: WS-PROC-1003
- Version: 1.0
- Effective Date: 2026-02-01