Write a Post-Mortem Report

Write a post-mortem report for the following incident or failure:

Incident description: [what happened]
Date and duration: [when it started and how long it lasted]
Impact: [who was affected, to what degree — users impacted / revenue lost / SLA breached]
Product / system affected: [describe the system]
Team involved: [roles involved in response]

Post-mortem structure:

1. Executive summary (5 sentences max): what happened, impact, root cause, status of fix
2. Timeline:
   - [TIME]: event or action (in chronological order from first sign to resolution)
3. Root cause analysis:
   - Immediate cause: the direct trigger
   - Contributing factors: 3–5 systemic issues that made this possible (use "5 Whys" approach)
   - Note: avoid blame — focus on systems, not people
4. Impact assessment: quantify the impact as precisely as possible
5. What went well: during the incident response — important for morale and learning
6. What went wrong: the gaps in process, tooling, or communication
7. Action items:
   - Each item: description / owner / due date / priority
   - Separate: fix the immediate issue / prevent recurrence / improve detection / improve response
8. Lessons learned: the 2–3 most important things the team now knows that it didn't before