Postmortem Reports

A postmortem is a structured write-up of what went wrong, what impact it had, and why it happened. StatusPage.me lets you write a postmortem directly on any resolved incident and optionally publish it to your status page so your users can read it.

When to Write a Postmortem

Postmortems are most valuable after:

• Extended outages (30+ minutes)
• Incidents that impacted a significant portion of users
• Repeated failures of the same component
• Incidents where the root cause wasn’t immediately obvious

For brief, self-resolved incidents, a postmortem is optional.

The Three Sections

Every postmortem has three structured sections, all supporting Markdown with a live side-by-side preview.

Summary

A concise overview of the incident: what happened, when, and the overall impact. Written for a general audience — your users, stakeholders, or customers.

Example:

On March 25 between 14:12 and 15:44 UTC, our API Gateway was unavailable due to a misconfigured load balancer rule deployed in the 14:10 release. Approximately 35% of API requests failed during this window.

Impact

A quantified description of who and what was affected. Include metrics where possible.

Example:

• 35% of API requests returned HTTP 502 errors
• Affected regions: EU-West, US-East
• Approx. 1,200 active users impacted
• No data loss occurred

Root Cause

A technical explanation of what caused the incident and the chain of events that led to it. This section is primarily for your engineering team and technically-minded readers.

Example:

A deployment at 14:10 UTC updated the load balancer health check path from /health to /healthz. The old path was removed in the same release but the load balancer configuration was not updated atomically. All instances appeared unhealthy to the load balancer, which began routing traffic to a single fallback instance that could not sustain the load.

Writing a Postmortem

1. Open the resolved incident from your dashboard
2. Click Write Postmortem (or Edit Postmortem if one already exists)
3. Fill in the Summary, Impact, and Root Cause sections
4. Use the Preview pane on the right to see the rendered Markdown
5. Choose whether to publish (visible on your status page) or save as draft (internal only)
6. Click Save

Where It Appears

When published, the postmortem appears:

• On your public status page, linked directly from the incident entry in the incident history
• Visitors see a “Postmortem available” link alongside the resolved incident

If saved as a draft, it is only visible to your team inside the dashboard.

Plan Availability

Postmortem reports are available on Starter and above (including OSS Hero).

Related

• Incident Tasks — track response steps during the incident (feeds into postmortem content)
• Incident Archiving — hide resolved incidents from the public list without deleting the postmortem
• Runbooks — pre-written playbooks for common failure modes