That's just it, though. This is the public face of the team that responded to that outage. It absolutely represents them. Now, whether it's a fair depiction or not is definitely a valid question.

Having written more than my fair share of these, I definitely understand the difficulty involved in choosing your audience and writing to them. That's a big part of the problem here: The audience is not clear. It bounces between technical detail like MySQL recovery process, but it doesn't go deep enough to be satisfying for a really technical audience while being too detailed for a non-technical one.

I have nothing but admiration for their team and the service they've built, but this post-mortem misses the mark.