When operating critical business systems, organizations must prepare for events that exceed the scope of everyday IT problems. Major incident management represents a specialized process designed to handle high-impact, high-urgency situations that affect large numbers of users or essential services. Unlike standard incident workflows, this approach prioritizes rapid service restoration when outages or severe degradations threaten financial standing and operational continuity. Integrated ITSM platforms often improve coordination during these events by eliminating information silos and enabling real-time data sharing between teams and tools, which supports faster decision-making and response — see real-time data.
Major incident management addresses high-impact situations threatening essential services, prioritizing rapid restoration over standard workflows when critical systems fail.
You classify incidents as major based on specific criteria. Critical impact on core services, such as complete outages or data loss, triggers this designation. Similarly, situations affecting significant customer populations, presenting high financial or reputational risk, or requiring executive awareness all qualify. The classification depends on three factors: impact, urgency, and scope, determined through predefined prioritization rules.
The process follows four distinct stages. Identification occurs through automatic detection via trigger rules or manual declaration by directors, the CIO, or service owners. Mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) measures how quickly your organization recognizes these events.
Containment begins immediately as you assemble the major incident team and incident commander, establish a conference bridge, set up a war room, and inform stakeholders. You also create a problem ticket to address underlying issues and implement immediate workarounds.
During resolution, you implement controlled changes following predefined paths while resolving child incidents. Your team involves specialist support or third-party suppliers as needed. The priority remains service restoration rather than identifying root causes initially. You escalate issues to appropriate teams using established management tools. The change manager takes full ownership and accountability for the change ticket implementing the fix.
Post-incident review completes the cycle. After restoring service, you conduct thorough analysis with stakeholders to prevent recurrence and improve processes. This stage includes creating problem records for root cause analysis, evaluating response effectiveness, and documenting lessons learned. You verify user satisfaction before closing all records. The organization publishes a Post Incident Report within 24–48 hours summarizing the incident timeline and restoration steps.
This structured approach guarantees coordinated responses beyond normal workflows. By following these stages systematically, you minimize service unavailability and protect your organization from the cascading effects of critical failures. The framework provides clear decision points and actionable steps that guide your team through chaotic situations toward successful resolution.
