Post-incident review on the Atlassian April 2022 outage
I sincerely hope all of the people who worked on the recovery effort are okay, and are being well supported and strongly encouraged to tend their mental health. I have no personal investment in Atlassian products—if anything, unrelated to this or any incident, I could happily never use them again.<p>But the people who work there are human, and I know what kind of a toll a protracted recovery effort can take. I know it from chronic pain two years after the burnout started. No one should experience that.<p>I know it’s probably not the thing Atlassian the business thinks they should communicate to customers&#x2F;general public, and it’s not surprising it’s absent, but it’s a shame they did not address the well being of their staff. Especially those who undoubtedly put exhausting effort into recovering from this incident.<p>And sure, that would be unusual as a business communication. But should it be? Even before this severe burnout, I would have looked at this list of lessons learned and thought “a lot of people are going to be overworking the same as they’ve been through all of this, but now they’ll be doing it invisibly.” And that definitely doesn’t inspire confidence that there won’t be another catastrophic mistake in the near future—it doesn’t make me <i>more</i> confident in the business.<p>None of this is a strong criticism, just some observations from being on the other side of a marathon incident recovery.