What to Do When Your Company Outage Makes Headlines
By Julianna Jacobson, writing for PR News
In the last few days, major platforms relying on AWS experienced widespread outages, leaving users locked out, brands scrambling internally and support teams overloaded with frustration they didn’t create but are expected to fix. What happened was bigger than a technical disruption: it was a trust disruption. And when your company becomes news, your reputation—not your infrastructure—determines how fast you recover.
The hard truth? Most companies prepare for technical recovery. Very few prepare for reputational recovery. Servers can be rebooted, but customer sentiment, investor confidence and brand perception require a different playbook.
Phase 1: The First 30 Minutes—Own the Narrative, Don’t Chase It
Silence is not neutrality; it creates a vacuum filled with speculation, screenshots and public frustration. First, you must acknowledge the impact before all the facts are known.
What to do immediately:
- Publish a holding statement that emphasizes the impact on users rather than using technical jargon.
- Use simple language. For example, releasing “We know this is affecting your business and your trust in us,” is much more effective than “We’re experiencing degraded performance.”
- Designate a visible and credible spokesperson instead of relying on a faceless status page. People trust individuals, not automated updates.
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