The recent CrowdStrike debacle gives lessons for all of us in how to (and how not to) communicate in a crisis. The initial tweeted response from CEO George Kurtz fell flat, as panned by comms expert Davia Temin:
“This is a response scrubbed by a legal team with lawsuits in mind. It holds little to no accountability, which is what makes apologies so powerful. And it positions Kurtz almost as an AI voice — automated, soulless. In fact, ChatGPT does a better job of appearing to care than he does.”
A bundled attempt to apologize to partners with a gift card didn’t help, as captured in this PCGamer headline:
“After crashing 8.5 million computers, CrowdStrike says sorry to its partners with a $10 Uber Eats gift card, which was also broken.”
Ultimately and eventually, the company found its way to a full-throated apology, but the early missteps made a bad situation worse.
As Ben Horowitz wrote in “The Hard Thing About Hard Things:”
“If you are going to eat shit, don’t nibble.”
While an extreme case, CrowdStrike illustrates some of the tensions at play in any brand crisis — trying to balance responsibility and mitigate liability with incomplete information while still trying to fix the issue. The path of least resistance is a Mad Libs corporate apology that satisfies no one.
Far more effective than an apology is an amend. It’s not just about saying sorry — it’s about taking responsibility to make things right.
What’s at stake is everything invested in building a brand in the first place. As CrowdStrike CSO Shawn Henry put it, “The confidence we built in drips over the years was lost in buckets within hours.”
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
