Incident response process

At times, partners may experience issues with an integration. Some issues may severely impact a partner's business. Canva refers to such issues as Incidents.

Canva has a streamlined process to address incidents. Partners must follow this process and report incidents immediately. This helps Canva resolve issues quickly and reduce the adverse impact on a partner's business.

This document explains Canva's incident response process.

Incident vs. Bug

Not all issues are incidents. Some issues may be bugs. Canva differentiates incidents from bugs in the following way:

Issue type	Description	Severity	Attention
Incident	Severely impacts a partner's business. See Types.	High	Immediate
Bug	Affects only a few users, designs, or artworks, and not the entire business.	Medium, Low	Can wait

Types

Canva classifies incidents into the following types:

Incident	< 0.05% Affected users	0.05% - 1% Affected users	1% - 10% Affected users	> 10% Affected users
Core feature broken	Minor	Major	Major	Critical
Non-core feature broken	Minor	Minor	Minor	Major
Performance severely affected (barely usable)	Minor	Minor	Major	Critical
Performance slightly affected (degraded, but usable)	Minor	Minor	Minor	Major

Response team

Canva has a team of engineers on call to respond to incidents and a dedicated team to specifically respond to partnership incidents.

Canva has tooling to monitor the health and performance of its system. Canva sets up these monitors to proactively alert Canva engineers of failures in the system.

Canva engineers get to know of a failure even before a partner gets to know.

Monitoring dashboard

Canva has a dashboard that shows the system's status in real time. The dashboard is available at https://www.canvastatus.com/.

If partners suspect something's wrong with an integration, they can check the status in the dashboard.

Partners can receive alerts when Canva creates, updates, or resolves an incident, or changes a component status.

To subscribe to alerts:

Navigate to Canva's monitoring dashboard at https://www.canvastatus.com/.
Click SUBSCRIBE TO UPDATES.
Select the way you want to receive alerts:
1. For webhook notifications, specify the endpoint URL.
2. For email notifications, specify an email address.

Report incidents

To report an incident:

Navigate to the Canva Helpdesk.
Select Incident.
Select Report an incident.
Fill out the required fields.
Attach screenshots and code snippets as needed.
Click Send.

Canva engineers will respond via the ticket. The response time varies according to the incident type. Only if they deem necessary, will they contact a partner via other means, such as telephone or video call.

Report bugs

To report bugs:

Navigate to the Canva Helpdesk.
Select Support.
Select Report a bug.
Fill out the required fields.
Attach screenshots and code snippets as needed.
Click Send.

Canva engineers will respond via the ticket during their regular business hours.

Response time

Canva's response time varies according to the incident type:

Response	Critical	Major	Minor
Acknowledge	Within 15 minutes	Within 15 minutes	Within 8 hours
Start	Immediately	Immediately	Within 8 hours
Update	Every hour	Every hour	As per Canva's Bug Fix Policy
Resolve	Within 8 hours	Within 24 hours	As per Canva's Bug Fix Policy
Inform	Immediately after resolving	Immediately after resolving	Immediately after resolving
Close	Within 15 minutes of informing	Within 15 minutes of informing	Within 15 minutes of informing

Actions

Canva takes the following actions after the incident:

Starts the root cause analysis immediately. If notified outside of business hours, Canva starts the analysis the next business day.
Prepares a Root Cause Analysis report (RCA report). The report has:
1. Issue summary.
2. Incident duration.
3. Incident start timestamp and end timestamp.
4. Number of affected customers.
Sends the RCA report to the partner.