# Customer-facing postmortem

> Explain an outage to customers honestly, without leaking internals or blaming a person.

- Skill: `vstorm-co/customer-facing-postmortem` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add vstorm-co/customer-facing-postmortem`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/vstorm-co/customer-facing-postmortem/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- Author: vstorm-co (https://skillmd.com/u/vstorm-co)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/vstorm-co/customer-facing-postmortem

---


# Writing a customer postmortem

Customers forgive outages. They do not forgive discovering it was worse than
they were told.

## The structure

What happened, in their terms · when it started and ended, in UTC with a local
note · who and what was affected, specifically · what caused it, honestly and
without internal detail · what was done · what changes so it does not recur,
with dates.

## Honesty rules

Say "we deployed a change that…" rather than "an issue occurred". Passive voice
reads as evasion. Never name an individual — the failure is the system's, and a
named engineer is a hostile act.

## Data

If data was lost, exposed or delayed, say so in the first paragraph. Burying it
turns an outage into an incident of trust, and it always surfaces.

## The commitments

Only what is already scheduled with an owner. A postmortem promise that does not
land is worse than not making it.

## Never

Overstate the fix, promise it cannot happen again, or publish before the
timeline is confirmed.