To stay ahead of the curve, we share insights on current crisis events such as the CrowdStrike outage of July 18, 2024, offering analysis and next-step recommendations.
CrowdStrike Crisis Communications Review
- PR Crisis Affects Share Price: With no timetable for resolution for four days and Delta threatening to sue for flight delay losses, CrowdStrike share price dive 32% within 12 days.
- 6Cs Framework: CrowdStrike did not display concern, clarity, control, confidence, competence and context in its communications, exacerbating a crisis situation.
PR Takeaways
- PR Must Review Management Tweets: George Kurtz, CrowdStrike CEO, made things worse by issuing a non-apologetic tweet on July 18, 2024 followed by an apology in a Sky News interview hours later.
- One Source of Information: Set up a joint crisis communications newsroom with the affected partner. Crowdstrike looked worse when Microsoft blamed its lax kernel access management on EU regulations.
- Ask the Right Questions Internally: Use the Gini Dietrich model to guide crisis communications.
- What's the worst thing that could happen?
- Is this scenario an issue or a crisis? Issues aren't going to damage your reputation or bottom line, but it could become an issue if you don't deal with it quickly.
- How big is our risk?
- Can it be prevented? This is a question for brainstorming in advance during the planning process.
- What would escalate it to a crisis? This could include not responding, an insensitive canned response, repeatedly lying, or not saying I'm sorry.
- Who needs to know and when? Failure to get out in front of a story when called for escalates a crisis.
