Publish a post-mortem for a resolved incident
Once an incident is resolved, you can write up what happened and, when you’re ready, put that write-up on your public status page. The post-mortem is a separate document from your incident updates — you can draft it privately for as long as you need, and nothing about publishing it changes the incident’s timeline or its resolved time.
Before you start
A post-mortem is only available on an incident that is:
- Resolved — you can’t start one while an incident is still investigating, identified, or monitoring.
- Not a maintenance window — scheduled maintenance doesn’t carry a post-mortem.
If either of those isn’t true, you won’t see the post-mortem card on the incident detail screen — unless a post-mortem has already been written, in which case the card stays but is read-only.
Write a draft
- Open the resolved incident from Incidents.
- Find the post-mortem card on the incident detail screen and start writing. The editor takes Markdown, so headings, lists, and tables all render properly both on the status page and in the announcement email.
- Save your draft. In the web editor, stop typing and your work is saved automatically after a short pause. In the iPhone editor, tap Save as draft when you want to save your changes.
While a post-mortem is a draft, it is private to your team. It never appears on the public status page and it’s never included in the public incident list or detail payloads — customers and subscribers have no way to see it exists until you publish it. The button at the bottom of the editor reads Save as draft to make this state obvious, with a hint that the draft stays private until you publish.
Publish it
When the report is ready for customers:
- Click Publish.
- Confirm in the dialog that appears. The Email subscribers choice is made before this, on the card itself — the checkbox sits in the same row as the Publish button and is ticked by default, so publishing emails subscribers unless you untick it.
For Public incidents, publishing puts the report on the public status page. For Internal incidents, publishing keeps the report internal to your team until the incident itself is made Public. Subscriber email is only effective for Public incidents — the checkbox is offered either way, but on an Internal incident no email is sent.
Publishing is one-shot: once a report is published, clicking Publish again isn’t offered — the editor’s “Done” button now reads Save changes instead, since you’re editing a live document rather than a draft. Edits to an already-published report save into what’s already public: in the web editor, changes autosave after a short pause; in the iPhone editor, tap Save changes when you’re done. For Public incidents, saved edits appear on the status page on its next load — each save on a published report clears the cached public page data straight away.
If you chose to email subscribers, the notification goes out to everyone subscribed to all updates on your status page, plus anyone subscribed to that incident specifically, formatted as a document (headings, tables, and links render properly) rather than as a plain incident update.
Mark a post-mortem as “not needed”
Not every resolved incident needs a write-up. If you don’t want one, you can mark the post-mortem as not needed from the same card instead of leaving a blank draft behind. This is just a way to close out the card — it doesn’t publish anything.
Withdraw a published post-mortem
If a published report needs to come down — it was published in error, or it needs a rewrite before it’s shown again — use Remove from the overflow menu on the post-mortem card. Withdrawing:
- Deletes the report from the incident.
- Removes it from the public status page immediately.
There’s no “unpublish to draft” step — withdrawing erases the report, so if you want to publish again later you’ll be writing it again from scratch.
What happens if the incident is reopened
If a resolved incident is reopened, its post-mortem doesn’t disappear, but it does freeze:
- The editor is no longer available — you can’t edit the text, publish a draft, or mark it “not needed” while the incident is open.
- The card stays visible and shows a line explaining why it’s currently read-only.
- Remove is still available. If the incident is reopened because the outage isn’t actually over, you can still withdraw a published report that’s now telling customers the incident is resolved when it isn’t.
- If the report was already published, it stays on the public status page during the reopen — reopening does not automatically pull it down. Use Remove if that’s not what you want.
Once the incident is resolved again, the post-mortem becomes editable and publishable as normal.