Outage Mitigation Guide

The problem

In the event of an outage, it is crucial to have a plan in place to mitigate the impact on users. This guide outlines the steps to take when a Chroma outage occurs, including how to communicate to users regarding the issue and potential resolution steps.

What is a Chroma outage?

In the rare event of the Chroma AWS S3 bucket being unavailable, your application's <BrandProvider /> component will not be able to load the brand assets (css variables for design tokens, fonts, icons etc). This can lead to a degraded user experience, as the application may not display correctly.

The solution

As part of the <BrandProvider /> component, we have implemented a fallback mechanism to handle such outages to ensure that your application can take appropriate action when the brand assets are not available.

There are two event handlers available as part of the <BrandProvider /> component, onLoaded which is called when the version.css file is successfully loaded, and onError which is called when the version.css file fails to load.

You can utilise the onError event handler to implement a fallback mechanism in your application. This can include displaying a message to users, redirecting them to a maintenance page or if you wish using the default fallback styles provided by the Chroma components. The default styles are a simplified version of the Monochroma theme and therefore may not be suitable for all applications.

In most cases IAG applications usually redirect users to a technical outage page which informs them of the outage and provides further instructions. Please ensure that an equivalent of an Alert component displays the information in an accessible manner. We recommend setting role="alert" on the element that contains the message to ensure that screen readers announce the message to users.