Severity
A classification of how much impact an incident or defect has.
Plain English
How serious is the impact?
In context
Severity levels help teams coordinate response urgency communication and escalation based on predefined impact criteria.
Example
“The widespread login outage is severity one.”
When you'll hear this
- incident response
- bug triage
- support escalation
Common misunderstanding
Severity describes impact while priority also accounts for timing and business choice.
Also known as
sev
Commonly used by
Related terms
Updated: 2026-08-25
