Narrative Tenses in IT Incidents

• When we describe past incidents, we use narrative tenses together. We combine past simple, past continuous, and past perfect to show the exact order of events during a system crash.
• Tense
• Use
• Example
• Past Simple
• Main completed actions in a sequence
• The database crashed at midnight.
• Past Continuous
• Actions in progress at a specific past moment
• While Mark was checking logs, the alert sounded.
• Past Perfect
• Actions happening before another past action
• They had fixed the bug before users logged in.
• Remember
• Use the past simple for the main narrative sequence.
• Use the past continuous for longer background actions interrupted by short ones.
• Use the past perfect for actions completed before another past action.
• Examples
• While Sarah was running the query, the primary server failed.
• The engineers had already restarted the replica when the manager arrived.
• They discovered the deadlock after the system stopped responding.
• Common mistakes
• When David arrived, the team repaired the disk.
• When David arrived, the team were repairing the disk.

Complete the sentences

• While Brian (check) ____ the logs in Chicago, the server crashed.
• The team (already / apply) ____ the patch when the network failed in Boston.
• Karen (write) ____ the incident report after the system recovered in Austin.
• While Kevin (run) ____ the query, the connection timed out in Denver.
• They (not / notice) ____ the corruption before the audit started.
• Emma (monitor) ____ the traffic when the replica failed.

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