How subscribing works
If your status page has subscriptions enabled, visitors can sign up with their email address to get notified about announcements you publish.
A visitor enters their email address on your status page and submits it.
They receive a confirmation email with a link. Signing up doesn’t take effect until they click it — this is a double opt-in, so an address can’t be subscribed without its owner confirming.
The confirmation link expires after 2 days. If a visitor needs a new one, they can request it again, but only once per hour per email address.
How to unsubscribe
Every notification email includes an unsubscribe link. Clicking it — and confirming — permanently removes that email address from your status page’s subscriber list. There’s also an unsubscribe link in your status page’s footer for subscribers who no longer have a notification email on hand.
What actually triggers a subscriber email
This is the part that surprises people: subscribers are emailed only when you publish an announcement on your status page. Monitor downtime and recovery are never emailed to subscribers automatically — there is no separate “your service went down” notification. If you want subscribers to hear about an outage, you have to publish an announcement about it yourself.
Announcement emails also aren’t instant. They’re sent by a background job that checks for new announcements every 5 minutes, and it will only send an announcement’s email if the current time falls between 5 minutes and 1 hour after the announcement’s start date/time (the “Publish at” field when creating it). Outside that roughly 55-minute window, the email is silently never sent — there’s no retry, and nothing will tell you it was missed.
In practice, this means:
If you publish an announcement with its start date/time set to right now, subscribers will get the email within about 5–60 minutes.
If you set the start date/time more than an hour in the past (for example, backdating an announcement to when an incident actually started), the notification job will already be past its window by the time it checks — subscribers won’t be emailed at all.
If you schedule an announcement for a future start date/time, the email goes out 5–60 minutes after that future time arrives, not when you save the announcement.
Tip: if you need subscribers notified about something happening now, set the announcement’s start date/time to the current time when you publish it, rather than backdating it. That keeps you safely inside the send window.