Mass notification / critical event management
Reach everyone in seconds across SMS, email, push, and voice — with escalation that does not stall, runnable playbooks, and multi-cloud delivery so a single provider outage never silences the alert. A modern alternative to the heavyweight CEM suites.
The incumbent critical-event suites are powerful and heavy: long procurement, per-seat licensing, a six-month rollout, and an architecture that often runs on a single cloud — so the platform you bought to announce an outage can be taken out by the same outage. Notification also arrives as an island, disconnected from the access, playbooks, and audit trail the rest of the response needs. The job is real; the bloat is optional.
Each card pairs the operational pressure with the concrete capability. The delivery resilience rests on the resilience and distributed architecture.
During a critical event one channel is never enough. Email queues, SMS gateways throttle, and push fails on locked phones. You need to reach everyone, fast, and know who actually received it.
SMS, email, push, and voice fallback fired in parallel with per-recipient delivery receipts and acknowledgement tokens. The message reaches a team of five or an estate of thousands the same way — and you can see who has seen it.
A notification nobody acknowledges is a notification that failed. Without timeout and retry logic, an unanswered first contact just sits there while the event escalates.
Per-team escalation chains with timeout, retry, and automatic roll-over to the next contact. Acknowledgement tracking shows exactly where in the chain the response landed — and where it did not.
Crisis-time decision-making degrades. A 40-page response plan nobody opens under stress is theatre. The plan has to be executable as concrete, checkable steps.
Structured playbooks with checkable steps, per-step approvals, and references to the contacts and credentials each step needs. A notification can launch a playbook; the whole run is captured end-to-end.
Blasting everyone for a localised event is how people learn to ignore your alerts. You need to reach the right groups — by team, site, role, or on-call rota — without manual list-building.
Recipient groups by team, location, role, and rota, with encrypted contact records and blind-indexed search. Target a single building or the whole organisation; the targeting is repeatable, not improvised.
A mass-notification platform that runs on one cloud fails at exactly the moment a regional outage makes you need it. The alerting layer cannot share a failure domain with what it alerts on.
Glassbreak runs on independent verticals (AWS and Scaleway, with Fly.io planned) kept consistent by native streaming replication. A single-cloud, DNS, or CDN outage does not take the notification path down with it.
After a critical event, the questions are: who was notified, when, on which channel, and who acknowledged. Reconstructing that from gateway logs is its own crisis.
Every send, delivery receipt, and acknowledgement recorded with cryptographic integrity and exportable as PDF or JSON — the evidence for the post-incident review, the board, or a regulator.
Where a modern, multi-cloud platform differs from the incumbent critical-event-management approach.
Monolithic SaaS on a single cloud; the alerting layer can share a failure domain with the outage it is meant to announce.
Independent multi-cloud verticals with no shared failure domains for DNS, CDN, or database; delivery survives a single-provider outage.
Notification-only point tool; break-glass access, recovery playbooks, and secure comms live in separate products.
Notification is one pillar of a break-glass and resilience platform — escalation, playbooks, quorum access, and audit in one place.
Contact data and message content readable by the vendor; residency is contractual.
Contacts and payloads encrypted on-device; zero service-held keys; residency-zone isolation for where data physically lives.
Per-seat enterprise licensing, long procurement, heavyweight rollout.
Free tier to evaluate, self-serve onboarding, and a path to Premium without a six-month implementation.
Comparison describes general characteristics of legacy critical-event-management suites and is not a statement about any specific named product. Third-party names are trademarks of their respective owners.
The alert is the start of the response, not the end of it. On Glassbreak the same platform that sends the notification also holds the break-glass credentials, runs the recovery playbook, and keeps the audit trail — so the people you reach can act, with the context they need.
It covers the same critical-event-management job — multi-channel mass notification, escalation, and runnable response plans — without the legacy bloat, single-cloud fragility, and per-seat pricing of the incumbent suites. Glassbreak goes further by making notification one pillar of a break-glass and resilience platform rather than a standalone point tool.
SMS, email, push, and voice fallback, fired in parallel with per-recipient delivery receipts and acknowledgement tokens so you can see who actually received and acknowledged each message.
Glassbreak runs on independent verticals across more than one cloud, kept consistent by native Postgres streaming replication. If one cloud, DNS, or CDN is degraded, the notification path continues from a healthy vertical. The alerting layer does not share a failure domain with the systems it is alerting on.
Each team has an escalation chain with timeout, retry, and automatic roll-over to the next contact. Acknowledgement tracking records who responded and where in the chain it landed, so an unanswered first contact does not stall the response.
Yes. Notifications integrate with structured, checkable playbooks — including per-step approvals and references to the contacts and credentials a step needs. The whole run is captured in one auditable timeline, exportable for the post-incident review.
Book a demo to see multi-channel delivery, escalation, and a playbook run against your own scenarios — or start free, load a group, and fire an acknowledged test notification yourself.
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