CRISIS KIT PRO™
Crisis playbook — free

The product is down and customers are furious.

Outrage during an outage is mostly an information vacuum. Fill it on a schedule and the temperature drops. Go silent and the vacuum fills with the worst interpretation.

First: the next 15 minutes

Status page or pinned post within the hour: 'investigating X, next update by [time]' — then keep the cadence even when the update is 'still working'.

Say nothing publicly yet. Nothing you publish in the next 15 minutes fixes this — but one wrong sentence lasts forever. Then:

Score the severity — free, 2 minutes
What NOT to do
  • Promise a fix time engineering hasn't confirmed — a missed ETA is a second crisis
  • Minimize ('a small number of users') — someone always has the screenshot proving otherwise
  • Wait until it's fixed to communicate — the update IS the product during an outage
Your likely lane

Almost always Acknowledge with a technical holding statement: known symptom, confirmed scope, committed update cadence. If customers lost data or money: upgrade to Apologize with a concrete remediation.

Not sure which lane? Run the 60-second lane picker →

This page is the first aid kit. The full system is the hospital.
The Crisis Kit Pro™ gives you the fill-in-the-bracket templates for this exact scenario, the six-factor severity calculator, the approval workflow, and the hour-by-hour plan — $149 USD one-time payment.
Get Crisis Kit Pro — $149 USD pilot

Other scenarios:

A negative review is going viralA journalist wants comment by morningAn ex-employee is making allegationsYou made a public mistakeA co-founder dispute is going publicAnnouncing layoffs because of AI

Educational guidance, not legal advice. If safety, money, data, or legal rights are at stake, involve qualified counsel before any public statement.