Updated: 31 October 2026

Write a blameless incident postmortem

This prompt writes a blameless postmortem for an incident from the timeline you paste in, focused on causes and follow-up actions.

text-incident-postmortem — chatgpt — 53 words

Write a blameless postmortem for this incident.

Timeline of events: [TIMELINE]
Impact: [USERS AFFECTED, DURATION]
Cause as we understand it: [CAUSE]
How we detected and fixed it: [DETECTION AND FIX]

Structure: summary, impact, timeline, root causes using the five whys, what went well, what went badly, and action items with owners and deadlines.

Edit in the builder Copy & open ChatGPT ↗Copy & open Gemini ↗Copy & open Claude ↗

Focus on system and process gaps; if a person is the "root cause", keep asking why.

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What you will get

A blameless postmortem with a summary, impact, timeline, root causes worked out with five whys, what went well and badly, and action items with owners and deadlines.

Why it works

Blameless postmortems work because people share what really happened when they are not afraid of blame. The prompt asks for system causes through the five whys, and the tip catches the common trap of naming a person. Owned, dated actions turn the review into change, which is the reason to write one.

Common mistake

The root cause is a person.

Fix: As the tip says, keep asking why. “An engineer ran the wrong command” leads to why the command was so easy to run.

Also watch for

The timeline is fuzzy. Paste timestamps from logs, chat and alerts. Times turn a story into evidence.
Action items are vague. Ask for each action to be something you can finish and check, such as “add an alert when the queue passes 10,000”.

Try a variation: customer update

Ask for a short customer-facing incident summary: what happened, who was affected, what you fixed and what you changed so it does not happen again.

Still not right? Reply with this

Rewrite the action items so each has one owner, a date and a way to check it is done, and remove any that only say “be more careful”.