engineering

Incident Postmortem

Post-incident reviews produce lengthy narratives that need to be distilled into structured records for tracking and learning. This template captures the incident summary, timeline, root cause, customer impact, detection method, resolution steps, and follow-up action items, creating a consistent postmortem format across your engineering organisation.

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What users type

Postmortem for the April 2nd checkout outage, written by Owen Park. At 14:22 UTC our payment processing started returning 500 errors. Root cause was a Stripe webhook handler that wasn't handling a new event type (payment_method.automatically_updated) introduced in Stripe API 2026-03-15. The unhandled event caused our webhook processor to crash-loop, which backed up the queue and eventually starved the checkout flow of payment confirmations. About 340 customers saw failed checkouts over 47 minutes. We detected it through PagerDuty when error rate exceeded 5%. Fixed by deploying a catch-all handler and reprocessing the queue. Need to add webhook event type validation, set up a Stripe API changelog monitor, and load test the webhook queue under backpressure.

What you get

Author

Owen Park

99%

Incident Title

Checkout Outage - Stripe Webhook Handler Crash Loop

93%

Incident Date

2026-04-02

99%

Duration

47 minutes

98%

Root Cause

Unhandled Stripe webhook event type (payment_method.automatically_updated) from API 2026-03-15 caused webhook processor crash-loop, backing up queue and starving checkout flow

97%

Customer Impact

~340 customers experienced failed checkouts

98%

Severity

SEV2

90%

Action Items

1. Add webhook event type validation/catch-all. 2. Set up Stripe API changelog monitor. 3. Load test webhook queue under backpressure.

95%

Extracted fields

Field	Type	Required
Author	text	Required
Incident Title	text	Required
Incident Date	date	Required
Duration	text	Required
Root Cause	text	Required
Customer Impact	text	Required
Severity	select	Required
Action Items	text	Required

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