postmortemtemplatesSRE

Postmortem Template: Documenting Multi-Provider Outages (AWS, Cloudflare, X) for SRE Teams

UUnknown

2026-02-15

10 min read

A practical postmortem template for SREs handling multi-provider outages (AWS, Cloudflare, X). Includes timelines, supplier logs, RCA, and action items.

Hook: When multiple providers fail, your playbook won't save you unless your postmortem does

Multi-provider incidents are the hardest to contain: telemetry scattered across vendors, overlapping mitigation windows, contract and legal complexity, and a single source of customer frustration. For SRE teams and IT leaders in 2026, the pain is familiar — late-2025 and early-2026 outages across AWS, Cloudflare, and X have shown how quickly dependencies multiply and how little clarity teams have when the outage spans control planes. This postmortem template is built for those worst-case scenarios: it captures the documentation, timelines, supplier coordination records, and remediation tasks your SOC, SRE, and legal teams need to recover, comply, and improve.

Why a multi-provider postmortem differs (2026 context)

In 2026, several trends make multi-provider postmortems mandatory reading after every cross-provider incident:

Edge/intermediary entanglement: CDN, WAF, and API gateways are now deeply integrated into application logic; outages at any layer can cascade. See broader thinking on CDN transparency and edge performance.
API-first dependency graphs: Services rely on each other's APIs in ways that create dynamic failure modes — small provider-side throttles can look like application bugs. Consider architectural patterns and message broker resilience covered in the Edge Message Brokers review.
Faster regulatory triggers: Data residency rules, breach notification windows, and contractual SLAs require faster, more auditable supplier coordination logs. For secure notification channels and contractual notices, read about alternatives beyond email.
Shared responsibility ambiguity: With multi-cloud and third-party edge providers, the boundary of responsibility shifts mid-incident unless clearly recorded.

This template assumes your team must produce an auditable, actionable postmortem within 72 hours, with a full RCA and supplier coordination record within 30 days.

Postmortem Template: High-level structure (use this as a checklist)

Header Metadata
Executive Summary
Impact & Scope
Chronological Timeline (Layered: user, infra, provider)
Root Cause Analysis (technical + systemic)
Mitigation & Recovery Timeline
Supplier Coordination Log
Forensics & Evidence
Action Items & Owners (SLO/SLAs/Verification)
Lessons Learned & Preventive Controls
Appendices: logs, tickets, comms transcripts, contracts

Detailed template fields and guidance

1. Header Metadata (first 15 minutes)

Incident ID: Unique, prefixed (e.g., INC-2026-001-PROD).
Date/time discovered: UTC timestamp (automated if possible).
Severity: S1/S2 and impact indicators.
Reporters & escalation path: names, roles, pager IDs.
Providers involved: e.g., AWS (EC2/Route53), Cloudflare (CDN, DNS), X (social-API).
Primary contact for the postmortem: owner and deputy.

2. Executive summary (for execs & legal)

Two-paragraph summary: what happened, impact, who is accountable, and next steps. Keep it factual and avoid speculation.

Example: "On 2026-01-16 08:30 UTC, customers experienced API errors and degraded site load times affecting 27% of traffic. Root cause involved an AWS Route 53 misconfiguration coinciding with a Cloudflare edge cache purge and a downstream rate-limit event from X. Recovery completed by 11:45 UTC. No customer data leak was detected."

3. Impact & Scope

Customer-facing impact: percent of traffic, features affected, geographies.
Internal impact: CI/CD pipelines, monitoring gaps, incident management tooling.
Business impact estimate: downtime minutes, estimated revenue impact, SLA breaches.
Compliance/regulatory flags: PII exposed, data residency, notification windows.

4. Layered chronological timeline (the core of a multi-provider postmortem)

Construct a layered timeline with parallel streams: User / App / Infrastructure / Provider / Supplier Coordination. For each event use ISO timestamps, source, and artifact links.

Template timeline format (sample entries):

2026-01-16T08:28:12Z — User: Customers report 502/504s via monitoring and social mentions.
2026-01-16T08:29:05Z — App: Spike in 5xx errors in gateway logs; rate of 5xx increases 400% vs baseline.
2026-01-16T08:30:00Z — Infra (Cloudflare): Edge error rate rises; Cloudflare status shows partial degradation (ticket #CF-12345).
2026-01-16T08:31:20Z — Infra (AWS Route53): Unusual DNS propagation latency observed; internal DNS monitors show increased latencies for specific zones. For guidance on what to monitor to detect provider failures faster, see network observability for cloud outages.
2026-01-16T08:40:00Z — Supplier coordination: Opened high-priority with Cloudflare (P1), AWS (Severity 2), and reached out to X support for API rate-limit clarification; recorded support ticket IDs.
2026-01-16T09:10:34Z — Mitigation 1: Rolled back recent Route53 change; partial recovery observed for some regions.
2026-01-16T11:45:00Z — Recovery declared: All external monitoring green; begin verification and artifact collection.

Always link to raw logs, packet captures, and support ticket numbers. If you lack a centralized log store, capture screenshots and export data immediately — supplier tickets can be closed without your artifacts.

5. Root cause analysis (technical + systemic)

Use a two-part RCA: (A) Technical root cause; (B) Systemic / process root cause. Include evidence and confidence level.

Technical RCA: e.g., a Route53 TTL change combined with a Cloudflare purge overlapping a rate-limited X API that your fallback logic depended on.
Systemic RCA: why safeguards failed — versioned infra-as-code rollback lacking, no automated cross-provider chaos tests, producer-consumer contracts not enforced.

Methods: use fault-tree analysis or 5 Whys. Include a statement of confidence (high/medium/low) and a list of missing evidence if confidence is low.

6. Mitigation & recovery timeline (what we did, when, and why)

Document temporary and permanent fixes separately. Capture the decision rationale and any trade-offs.

Short-term mitigations: Rollbacks, BGP/DNS changes, emergency TTL adjustments, rate-limiter relaxations with revert windows.
Long-term fixes: Infrastructure-as-code checks, provider-specific health probes, SLA adjustments, contract changes.

Include verification steps: synthetic tests, customer sample checks, and traffic comparisons pre/post recovery.

7. Supplier coordination log (required for audits)

This section must be chronological and auditable. For each provider interaction include timestamp, channel (phone/email/chat), ticket ID, summary, and next steps.

Provider: Cloudflare
- Ticket: CF-12345
- Channel: Support chat (transcript link)
- Summary: Edge error spike coincided with global purge; Cloudflare identified internal routing flaps in POPs;
- Response ETA: 2 hours; provided mitigations: rollbacks and POP affinity change.
Provider: AWS
- Ticket: AWS-67890
- Summary: Route53 propagation irregularities due to internal config deployment; remote rollback executed.
Provider: X (API provider)
- Ticket: X-54321
- Summary: Confirmed downstream rate-limiting; recommended backoff and batch retries.

Keep this log immutable once published. Many regulators and auditors will request it. If you received a communication restriction (e.g., legal hold), note it here.

8. Forensics & evidence preservation

Preserve artifacts immediately and list storage locations and retention policies. Evidence items include:

Packet captures (pcap) around incident windows
Application and edge logs (raw)
DHCP/DNS and BGP routing tables if relevant
Provider status and incident pages (archived)
Support ticket transcripts

Note any gaps and explain why (e.g., instrumentation missing in region X). Create evidence hashes for integrity and store them in an immutable S3 bucket or your SIEM's evidence vault — patterns for multi-cloud and edge storage are discussed in cloud-native hosting evolution.

9. Action items, owners, and verification (the remediation roadmap)

Every action item must have: owner, priority, due date, success criteria, and verification method. Use the following structure for each task:

Action: Implement provider health probes for Cloudflare POP affinity
Owner: infra-sre-alex
Priority: P0
Due: 2026-02-02
Success criteria: 5 consecutive days of synthetic tests pass and chaos test injection shows graceful degradation

Include a verification sign-off process. For cross-team actions, require both engineering and vendor account manager acceptance before closure.

10. Lessons learned & preventive controls

List tactical and strategic lessons. For each, propose a control mapped to a category: Monitoring, Architecture, Process, Contract, Legal.

Lesson: Relying on one provider's purge semantics created a dependency chain
- Control: Enforce idempotent invalidation semantics and add client-side cache-bypasses for critical routes
Lesson: Supplier escalation was unclear across teams
- Control: Update supplier contact matrix and run quarterly escalation drills

Operational checklists and templates

Short supplier coordination checklist (use during incidents)

Record provider ticket ID and transcript link within first 15 minutes.
Escalate to provider account manager if impact > S2 within 30 minutes.
Ask for specific rollback options and estimated time to repair (TTR).
Request artifact retention for at least 90 days (for forensic needs).
Confirm whether provider can legally share debug data (helps with compliance reporting).

Customer-facing status template (short)

"We are investigating degraded API performance impacting a portion of customers. Our team and our service providers are actively mitigating. We will provide updates every 30 minutes until resolved."

Regulatory notification checklist (if PII or downtime thresholds met)

Log the data types affected and number of subscribers impacted.
Review contractual SLAs and notify legal within 2 hours if thresholds are exceeded.
Prepare breach notification draft within 24 hours if required by law. For secure notifications and channel options, see beyond email.
Maintain an auditable trail of supplier coordination to demonstrate due diligence.

Advanced strategies for SRE teams (2026-forward)

Beyond basic postmortems, modern SRE teams should bake multi-provider resilience into their workflows:

Cross-provider chaos engineering: Run monthly experiments that simulate one provider failing while another has degraded latency — pair this with edge broker tests like those in the Edge Message Brokers review.
Contractual incident playbooks: Negotiate provider contracts to include playbook alignment — e.g., joint incident calls and SLA remediation credits.
Federated observability: Implement a unified observability plane that ingests provider telemetry and normalizes events into a single incident timeline. See best practices in network observability for cloud outages.
Automated supplier escalations: Use runbooks that trigger provider escalation APIs or webhook-based alerts into provider support channels to reduce manual coordination time. For workflow automation patterns, evaluate Syntex workflows as a starting point for automating notes and timeline population.

Case example (anonymized, composite from late-2025/early-2026 patterns)

In a recent multi-provider outage, a sequence of events showed how brittle multi-vendor stacks can be: a misapplied DNS change in AWS elongated TTLs; Cloudflare performed a global cache purge at the same time; a downstream social API (X) tightened rate limits during a traffic spike. Individually these were manageable. Combined, they caused cascading retries, amplified error rates, and confused failover logic. The eventual fixes included coordinated rollbacks, temporary traffic shaping, and new contractual obligations for quicker communication between providers and customer account teams.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

Pitfall: Vague supplier tickets
- Fix: Use templated ticket language and require ticket IDs; escalate early.
Pitfall: No shared timeline
- Fix: Use a shared incident document with immutable entries for provider coordination. Embedding the template into your incident tooling (see below) removes ambiguity.
Pitfall: Missing evidence because logs rotated
- Fix: Automate snapshotting of logs during incident declaration — and consider augmenting with third-party bug-bounty or forensic programs when appropriate (running a bug bounty for cloud storage).

How to use this template in your workflow

Embed the template into your incident management tool (PagerDuty, Jira Ops, or your internal IMS). If you're building internal tooling to collect timelines automatically, the developer experience patterns in developer experience platforms are helpful.
Automate timeline population: ingest provider webhooks and monitoring alerts into the incident doc.
Assign a postmortem owner immediately — treat documentation as part of the response, not a post-fact add-on.
Publish an interim summary within 4 hours and a full postmortem within 72 hours. Deliver the final RCA and supplier coordination log within 30 days.

Closing: Key takeaways

Document early and often: The best postmortems start during the incident, not after.
Capture supplier coordination: Auditable provider logs and tickets are critical for compliance and remediation.
Separate technical and systemic RCA: Both matter for fixing the root cause and preventing recurrence.
Turn lessons into verifiable actions: Owners, deadlines, and verification close the loop.

Multi-provider incidents are inevitable in modern architectures. With a structured, auditable postmortem template tailored to cross-provider failure modes, SRE teams can recover faster, satisfy legal obligations, and harden systems against the next incident.

Call to action

Use this template as your baseline — adapt and automate it into your incident tooling. If you want a ready-to-import postmortem JSON and a supplier-coordination workbook customized for AWS, Cloudflare, and X, contact our incident team or subscribe for the downloadable kit and quarterly multi-provider war-game scenarios. For more on cloud-native evolution and storage considerations, see the evolution of cloud-native hosting, and for defensive telemetry vendor frameworks consult trust scores for security telemetry vendors.

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