<aside> 💡

This is a blameless postmortem template.

Focus on what allowed the failure, not who caused it.

The goal is systemic improvement, not individual blame.

Draft must be created within 48 hours of the incident while details are fresh.

</aside>

Incident Details

• Incident Date/Time: (e.g. 2025-09-13 14:30 UTC)
• Duration: (e.g. 2 hours 45 minutes)
• Severity: (e.g. SEV-1 Critical)
• Services/Systems Affected: (e.g. Checkout API, Database cluster A)
• Customer Impact: (e.g. 25% of transactions failed for EU users; 500 users affected)
• Incident ID/Reference: (e.g. PagerDuty incident #123, Jira INC-4567)
• Incident Commander (IC): (Name of on-call IC)
• Responders: (Names/roles of major responders, e.g. Jane Doe – SRE, John Doe – Database Admin)
• Postmortem Owner: (Person responsible for this report)
• Date Postmortem Draft Started: (must be ≤48h after incident)
• Postmortem Meeting: (Scheduled date/time for review meeting)

<aside> 💡

Reminder: Draft must be created within 48 hours of the incident while details are fresh.

</aside>

Summary (Brief Overview)

A few sentences summarizing the incident. Include what happened, the primary cause, the impact, and the duration.

<aside> ✂️

Example Summary: On [date], [service/system] experienced a [issue] due to a [cause], resulting in [impact]. The incident began at [start time] UTC and was resolved by [end time] UTC, lasting [duration]. This affected [X] customers (approximately Y% of users) and [key impact metric, e.g. N transactions failed].

</aside>

Impact

Describe the impact on users and business in detail. Provide specific metrics and facts:

• Scope of Impact: (e.g. 500 out of 2000 API requests failed, 25% of traffic)