Website Care, Performance & Security
Post-Mortem (Incident)
An incident post-mortem is a documented review of a service failure that records its impact, causes, response and actions to reduce recurrence.
After a website outage or security incident, restoring service is only the immediate task. A post-mortem examines how the problem arose, how people detected it, what the response achieved and what system or process changes could prevent the same failure. A useful report includes a timeline, customer impact, contributing factors, evidence, corrective actions, accountable owners and follow-up dates.
Google’s site reliability guidance emphasizes a blameless process: participants describe decisions and conditions without using the review to punish individuals. This is important because teams are more likely to surface weak alerts, unsafe deployment practices or unclear ownership when they can discuss those causes openly. Blameless does not mean that actions are optional or that material facts should be omitted.
A small-business website may need a short review rather than a formal engineering document. For example, a booking outage may reveal that nobody tested the form after a plugin update. A post-mortem differs from incident response, which governs detection and containment while events are unfolding. It also differs from a public apology; sensitive customer details should not be exposed in the internal lessons report.