Glossary

Postmortem

A written account of an incident, covering what happened, why, what it affected and what will change, written to learn from it rather than to assign blame.

Also called Incident report, Blameless postmortem, Root cause analysis.

In plain terms

The best postmortems are specific about mechanisms and honest about contributing factors, and they end with concrete changes. “Blameless” means focusing on the system that allowed a mistake, not on the person who made it.

Public postmortems are the backbone of CollectSEA. They’re how one company’s bad day becomes everyone’s lesson.

When it mattered

Documented incidentIncident 2025-11-18Cloudflare

Cloudflare’s 2025 postmortem traced a global outage to a database permissions change that doubled the size of a feature file, explained step by step with timelines and fixes.

Read the full record Source: blog.cloudflare.com