Not every IT incident is created equal. While many issues affect a single user or a small group of employees, some incidents have a widespread impact that can disrupt business operations, prevent customers from accessing services, or result in significant financial losses.
These high-impact events are known as Major Incidents, and they require a faster, more coordinated response than routine incidents.
What Is a Major Incident?
A Major Incident is an incident that has a significant impact on the business and requires an immediate, coordinated response to restore service as quickly as possible.
Unlike standard incidents, Major Incidents often affect multiple users, critical business functions, or customer-facing services.
Because of their urgency, organizations typically follow a specialized Major Incident Management process.
Examples of Major Incidents
Examples of Major Incidents include:
- A company-wide email outage
- An e-commerce website becoming unavailable
- A ransomware attack affecting multiple systems
- A cloud provider outage disrupting business operations
- A network failure across multiple locations
- A payment processing system going offline
- A widespread Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace outage
- A critical application crashing during business hours
These incidents often require multiple IT teams to work together simultaneously.
Why Major Incident Management Matters
Without a structured approach, Major Incidents can result in:
- Extended service outages
- Lost revenue
- Reduced employee productivity
- Customer dissatisfaction
- Reputational damage
- Increased business risk
A defined Major Incident process helps organizations restore service quickly while keeping stakeholders informed throughout the event.
How Major Incident Management Works
Although every organization has its own procedures, Major Incident Management typically follows these steps.
Detect the Incident
A Major Incident may be reported by users, identified through monitoring tools, or discovered by IT staff.
Assess the Impact
The organization determines whether the incident meets the criteria for being classified as a Major Incident based on its impact and urgency.
Activate the Response Team
A Major Incident Manager coordinates the response, bringing together the necessary technical teams and business stakeholders.
Restore Service
The primary goal is to restore service as quickly as possible—even if a temporary workaround is used initially.
Permanent fixes can be implemented later through Problem Management or Change Enablement.
Communicate Frequently
Regular updates are shared with users, leadership, and other stakeholders throughout the incident.
Clear communication helps reduce uncertainty and maintain trust.
Conduct a Post-Incident Review
After service is restored, the organization reviews what happened, identifies lessons learned, and implements improvements to reduce the likelihood of future Major Incidents.
Major Incidents vs. Standard Incidents
The key difference is business impact.
A standard incident typically affects one user or a small number of users and follows the normal Incident Management process.
A Major Incident affects critical services, large numbers of users, or essential business operations and requires immediate coordination across multiple teams.
Both are incidents—but Major Incidents receive a higher level of attention due to their potential business impact.
Major Incident Management and ITIL
Within the ITIL framework, Major Incident Management works closely with:
- Incident Management
- Problem Management
- Change Enablement
- Service Desk
- Information Security Management
- Service Level Management
- Continual Improvement
After every Major Incident, organizations should analyze what happened and identify opportunities to improve processes, technology, or communication.
Best Practices for Major Incident Management
Organizations can improve Major Incident response by:
- Establishing clear Major Incident criteria
- Defining roles and responsibilities before incidents occur
- Maintaining documented response procedures
- Practicing incident response through simulations
- Communicating frequently with stakeholders
- Conducting thorough post-incident reviews
- Tracking metrics such as Mean Time to Restore Service (MTRS) and customer impact
Preparation is the key to responding effectively when critical services fail.
Partner with Ashford Global
Ashford Global helps organizations implement ITIL best practices and improve IT Service Management through expert consulting and professional training. Whether you’re building a Major Incident Management process, improving operational resilience, or strengthening your ITSM capabilities, our experienced consultants can help your organization respond faster and recover more effectively.
Learn more about our consulting services:
https://ashfordglobalit.com/consulting/
Or explore our training programs:
https://ashfordglobalit.com/training/