PagerDuty Blog

#OnCallSelfie

Updated May 2018: On-call selfies were fun while they lasted, but we’ve decided to retire them out of the mobile app. You can still follow along on the greater Twitter community with #oncallselfie.


Being on-call can be rough. Nobody likes to be interrupted by work when going about their everyday lives — or worse, when sleeping. On-call shouldn’t glue you to your computer or require your constant attention, but when you do get interrupted, it’s important to stay calm and maybe even have some fun!

Enter #oncallselfie. Created by New Relic Site Reliability Engineer, prominent Tweeter and self-described Ops Punk Alice Goldfuss (@alicegoldfuss), #oncallselfie is a hashtag used to share the inconvenient and often ridiculous circumstances on-call people might find themselves in when paged. Here are a few examples:


Sharing an #oncallselfie on Twitter is a great way to share your frustration (or entertainment) with the community.

With Alice’s help, we’re proud to announce first-class support for taking #oncallselfies from within the PagerDuty mobile app! (iOS only for now, Android support coming soon!)

If you’re a PagerDuty customer with Twitter installed on your phone, you’ll be shown a button to take an #oncallselfie when you’re on call and have no open incidents. Our support for #oncallselfie is currently in beta and is being rolled out to more and more customers every day.

If you’re not interested in taking #oncallselfies in PagerDuty, don’t worry – the feature is completely opt-in. Customers are first shown the button in the PagerDuty app if they are logged into Twitter on their phones. On iOS, tapping the selfie button asks you for permission to access your camera. Denying this permission removes the selfie button, and you won’t be shown it in the future. If you change your mind after granting access and want to remove the button (on iOS):

  • Open the “Settings” app
  • Find the PagerDuty app in the list
  • Revoke (or deny) Camera and Photo permissions

We hope that this new feature is entertaining and fun — even if you don’t have the PagerDuty app, we encourage you to check out the hashtag and consider contributing!  We look forward to seeing more great #oncallselfies shared on Twitter!