Watch rooms add live incident coordination across teams

Watch rooms are live, multi-user chat spaces tied to one vendor incident. They sit alongside public incident comments (async, on the vendor page) and group Discuss threads (async, in your vendor-tagged communities). When an outage is active, a watch room gives IT and operations teams a shared channel to compare symptoms, workarounds, and timing before official status pages catch up.

Each incident gets at most one canonical room, created when someone joins during an ongoing or monitoring event. Rooms are available on all plans. Sign in, open Account/watch-rooms for a directory of active rooms on your watchlist plus any room you have joined, or use the Watch room button on Active now cards in Account/community. The incident share page at /vendors/{slug}/incidents/share also surfaces a live CTA when the incident qualifies.

Read access requires login and an active incident in our feed (ongoing or monitoring). Posting additionally requires the vendor on your watchlist. If you are reading without that vendor on your list, the room stays visible but the composer prompts you to add the vendor first, with plan-aware watchlist limits handled inline. Connect or group membership is not required to join or post.

Messages deliver over WebSocket with SSE fallback, the same transport patterns as DMs, with Redis fan-out across workers. System messages track vendor status transitions in the room timeline. In-room impact polls let members signal affected vs not affected without leaving the conversation. Choose a public room open to watchlist peers or a private room scoped to one of your groups when you need a tighter audience.

Lifecycle follows the incident. While status stays ongoing or monitoring, the room accepts new messages. When the vendor marks resolved, a grace window (default 30 minutes) keeps posting open while the outage winds down, then the room archives to read-only. If the incident reopens, the room reactivates. Vendor-removed incidents archive immediately with a clear banner. Archived rooms stay browsable for 30 days before retention purges messages.

Watch rooms are built for crisis coordination, not permanent archives. Use group Discuss or public comments when you need a durable thread after the incident closes. From the Community hub, Active now cards label Watch room vs Discuss so you can pick real-time coordination or async follow-up on the same outage.