A List of Post-Mortems

At least one of these is just terrible. The “Facebook” one is written by some firm trying to hawk their monitoring stuff. It implies you can understand what happened inside from glorified traceroutes.

What actually happened that night is far more complicated, and has nothing to do with people intentionally disconnecting the site from the internet.

Off topic but is the username inclusion in the domain for github.com in the HN submission new? I've never noticed that before.

This is cool, I always find postmortems interesting. The list has been around for a while, here are two other HN discussions:

August 2015 (17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10028353

January 2019 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18875834

And the announcement blogpost: http://danluu.com/postmortem-lessons/

I seem to be one of the lucky 10.000 today. I was not aware that this kind of information is collected like this.

On a side note - many of these are good samples of technical writing. They introduce the audience to the environment where failure occurred, but in a way that doesn't take the focus away from the issue itself.

> Sweden. Use of different rulers by builders caused the Vasa to be more heavily built on its port side and the ship's designer, not having built a ship with two gun decks before, overbuilt the upper decks, leading to a design that was top heavy. Twenty minutes into its maiden voyage in 1628, the ship heeled to port and sank.

I don't know if this belongs in the list. xD

I accidentally clicked on the name not the comments link. It seems like this recurs often

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/danluu

Can we also get some behind-NDA/service desk post mortems? IBM, Oracle Cloud, MuleSoft, Salesforce, etc. Having to submit a fucking service request to know why your business stopped running is a PITA.

Awesome.. been looking for something like this since 2 days

Very interesting. To bookmark when teaching to junior. Error happens: you must have recovery procedure.

This is a nice view of a facet or level of transparency from companies.

For anyone that actually has to maintain servers, this is terrifying.

That is awesome!

Thanks!