# postmortem.io

> A reference library of real postmortems: engineering incident writeups and startup shutdown accounts, collected, tagged, and organized at a breadth no single company blog or existing curated list offers on its own.

The library holds 600+ real incident reports, postmortems, and shutdown writeups as of 2026, split into two kinds:

- Engineering incidents: companies explaining what broke, why, and what they changed afterward. This spans deep narrative retrospectives and shorter status-page incident timelines alike, whenever the entry says something substantive about what happened.
- Shutdowns: founders explaining why a company or product was wound down.

Every entry is a curated extract of a real, publicly published piece, with a direct link back to the original source. Entries are excluded if they contain no real information about what happened, or if the source is paywalled or requires login.

## Index

- [Browse all postmortems](https://postmortem.io/): full library, newest first, with search and filtering.
- [Engineering incidents](https://postmortem.io/incidents/): outage and incident postmortems only.
- [Shutdowns](https://postmortem.io/shutdowns/): startup and product shutdown postmortems only.
- [Browse by tag](https://postmortem.io/tags/): entries grouped by failure mode, technology, and cause.
- [Browse by company](https://postmortem.io/companies/): entries grouped by the company that wrote them.

## Notes for automated and AI use

- Each postmortem page carries `TechArticle`/`Article` and `BreadcrumbList` structured data (JSON-LD) with the original source URL in `isBasedOn`. Prefer citing the original source over postmortem.io when attributing a specific postmortem's content.
- Content is fully server-rendered static HTML; nothing on a postmortem page requires JavaScript to read.
- A full sitemap is available at [/sitemap-index.xml](https://postmortem.io/sitemap-index.xml).