I first wrote this in May 2023 as a round-up of the year’s biggest PR disasters. This 2026 rewrite keeps the lessons and adds what I teach on our crisis courses.
A PR crisis is any event that threatens to seriously damage how people see your organisation, and with it your sales, your share price or your licence to operate. What turns a problem into a crisis is speed and visibility. Once the story is spreading faster than you can explain it, you are in one.
I first wrote this article in May 2023 as a list of the nine biggest PR crises of the previous twelve months. It covered energy companies posting record profits, Elon Musk buying Twitter, Gary Lineker and the BBC, P&O Ferries and Kanye West’s split with Adidas. Several of those stories have moved on since, and Lineker has now left the BBC altogether after a second social media row in May 2025. That is a lesson in itself, because a crisis you think is over rarely is.
So this is the 2026 version. It is less of a news round-up and more of a guide, built on what I have learned doing this job.
Crisis management has always been my favourite part of PR. I studied it at degree level, taught it as a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, and wrote the section on online crisis management for a CIPR handbook because, at the time, there was no framework for handling a social media crisis. I have been monitoring brand conversations since the early Radian6 dashboards, and these days my agency, Prohibition, runs crisis plans, simulations and media training for clients. Most of those jobs sit under an NDA, so I will lean on public examples and podcast stories rather than client names.
If you want the short version on video, we run free webinars on crisis and AI misinformation, and our free training materials and templates are a sensible place to start on a plan.
What is a PR crisis?
A PR crisis is a sudden, public threat to an organisation’s reputation that needs a fast, co-ordinated response to stop lasting damage to trust, revenue or relationships. It differs from a routine complaint because of scale and speed. One angry review is an issue. The same complaint repeated by journalists, politicians and thousands of strangers by lunchtime is a crisis.
When a client rings me in a panic, I ask them four questions before anything else:
- Could anyone be harmed, physically, financially or emotionally?
- Is it spreading beyond your own channels into news or other platforms?
- Could it affect sales, contracts, funding or regulators?
- Does it touch your values, your leadership or something you claim to stand for?
If the answer to any of those is yes, treat it as a crisis until you know otherwise. If every answer is no, it is probably an issue to manage calmly in the background, and over-reacting can turn it into a story.
The main types of PR crisis
Most crises I have worked on fall into one of five groups. Operational crises are things like product recalls, outages and data breaches. Conduct crises come from what a leader, employee or ambassador says or does. Self-inflicted communication crises start with your own post, advert or campaign. Values crises happen when a brand takes a stance, or is dragged into a debate, and gets attacked from one side or both. The newest group is external attack: fake accounts, misinformation and AI-generated deepfakes that put words in your mouth.
That last group is growing fastest. When we ran our AI misinformation webinar, I cloned my own voice and Will’s from about 30 seconds of audio, using a free tool, in roughly two minutes. Anyone can now manufacture a crisis about you, which is why our AI misinformation and crisis training exists.
How does a PR crisis affect a business?
A PR crisis hits a business in five places: revenue, value, contracts, people and memory. The first two get the headlines, but the last three often last longer.
Revenue: After the Bud Light partnership with influencer Dylan Mulvaney in 2023, the brand was attacked from one side, then the other, as it wavered. Anheuser-Busch reported a $395 million drop in North American revenue in the following quarter, roughly 10%. Bud Light also lost its place as America’s best-selling beer in shops to Modelo. I used this case on a crisis webinar because the damage came as much from the flip-flopping as from the campaign itself.
Value: The classic UK example is still Gerald Ratner. In 1991 he told the Institute of Directors that one of his products was “total crap”, and around £500 million was wiped off the company’s value afterwards. Every PR student I taught knew that story, and every chief executive should.
Contracts and licence to operate: P&O Ferries sacked 786 seafarers without consultation in March 2022, and its chief executive admitted to MPs that the company chose not to consult. A couple of months later the government ended a contract with P&O over the sackings. A crisis that reaches politicians reaches your contracts.
People: Crises land on human beings, usually the social media and customer service teams. In February 2020 Rishi Sunak, then Chancellor, posted a photo with a big bag of Yorkshire Tea, and the brand spent three days answering boycott calls over a photo it had nothing to do with. Its reply to one furious customer, “Sue, you’re shouting at tea”, has become a minor legend.
Memory: The internet does not forget, and neither do AI assistants. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews about your brand, old crisis coverage can shape the answer for years. That is a new kind of long tail, and it is one reason I now include search and AI answers in every post-crisis review.
What are some real PR crisis examples, and what do they teach?
The best crisis examples teach one clear lesson each. These are the ones I come back to most when I train teams, with the lesson first.
Silence makes everything worse: Royal Mail, 2012
A guest on Embracing Marketing Mistakes told us about joining Royal Mail just after the London Olympics. Royal Mail had issued a stamp for every British Olympic gold medal but, at first, had no plans to do the same for Paralympians, and Twitter exploded around lunchtime. The team was still evaluating a listening tool and had no process, so he sat watching TweetDeck scroll past “like a film reel” for hours without being able to reply. Royal Mail soon changed its mind and promised a stamp for every ParalympicsGB gold medal, but the silence had already done the damage.
Know who holds the passwords: HMV, 2013
When HMV made staff redundant, people who still had access to the official account live-tweeted the process. Ann Wright, a former BBC producer who now runs Rough House Media, made a simple point about this on the podcast. Every crisis plan should list who holds the logins, partly for this reason and partly because your head of social may be on holiday with no signal when it all kicks off.
Doing the right thing prevents most crises: P&O Ferries, 2022
Ann also made a point on the podcast that I agree with completely. You cannot stop every crisis, but you will have far fewer if you do the right thing in the first place. P&O Ferries was the example she used. If the company had followed proper employment procedures, there would have been no crisis to manage.
Pick a side and hold it: Bud Light, 2023
Brands can survive taking a stance. What they struggle to survive is backing away from it halfway through, because that upsets both camps at once. If you are not prepared to stand behind a campaign, do not launch it.
Humour works when you have earned it: Yorkshire Tea, 2020
Dom Dwight, who spent 18 years at Taylors of Harrogate, the company behind Yorkshire Tea, including a spell as marketing director, told us on the podcast that the brand “got battered” over the Rishi Sunak photo, and that it had happened before when David Cameron visited the factory. The brand stayed calm, pointed out it had not been involved, and used its well-known voice to ask people to be kind to its social team. That only works because the voice was built over years.
Own it fast at the top: CrowdStrike, 2024
In July 2024 a faulty CrowdStrike update took down around 8.5 million Windows devices, grounding flights and hitting hospitals. The chief executive apologised publicly within hours, and a senior executive later apologised again to the US Congress. The technical failure was enormous, but a clear apology from the top stopped it becoming a cover-up story as well.
What should you do in the first 24 hours of a PR crisis?
In the first 24 hours, acknowledge the problem quickly, take control of the timing, speak where the story is happening, and keep every team saying the same thing. You will not have all the facts, and you do not need them to say that you know there is a problem and are dealing with it.
This is the order we follow with clients:
- Get the crisis team together within the hour, including customer service, legal and HR, not just comms.
- Post a short holding statement that acknowledges the issue and says when you will update people.
- Take control of the timing by promising updates at set times, then keeping those promises.
- Respond on the platform where the story broke first, then point everything to one source of truth.
- Brief customer service and frontline staff with the same lines you are using in public.
- Monitor images and video as well as text, because a lot of misinformation is visual.
- Never delete fair criticism, and never let anyone argue with critics from the brand account.
- Apologise properly and early if you got it wrong, with what you are doing to put it right.
The timing point comes from a story I have told on several of our crisis webinars. Years ago I was speaking to the head of media relations at a business caught in a breaking national story, and their phones were ringing off the hook. She told the team to stop answering, issue a statement promising a full update at four o’clock, and then release another at a set time the next morning. That one decision gave them control back, and it works just as well on social media today.
Will Ockenden, my co-director, puts the case for speed well. If you say nothing, you leave a vacuum, and people fill it with speculation. Ann Wright said the same on the podcast. If you say nothing, people will think you are hiding something or that you have done something wrong.
The apology point matters more than people think. Ann worked in the BBC’s consumer unit on programmes from the Watchdog stable. She said that almost every complainant they rang told them the business had never apologised or accepted anything was wrong. A quick apology and a gesture would have turned many of them into advocates instead.
How do you prepare for a PR crisis before it happens?
You prepare for a PR crisis by writing a plan, testing it with realistic scenarios, and training the people who will have to speak. Most plans I review exist on paper, but nobody has ever practised them, and that is where they fall apart.
A workable crisis plan includes:
- A named crisis team with clear roles, deputies and out-of-hours contacts.
- A risk list covering internal threats, such as staff conduct or data, and external threats, such as protests, outages or deepfakes.
- Pre-approved holding statements for your most likely scenarios.
- Logins, escalation routes and sign-off rules for every channel.
- Monitoring set up before you need it, with agreed alert thresholds.
- Media-trained spokespeople who have rehearsed tough interviews.
- A policy for staff posting on personal accounts.
Then test the plan properly. We run crisis simulations where a scenario unfolds in real time, with fake social posts, journalist calls and a deadline. People learn more in two hours of that than from reading a fifty-page plan. Our crisis management training is built around exactly that, and we cover personal accounts in training for the whole team.
If you only do one thing this month, write three holding statements for the three crises you fear most. It takes an afternoon and could save you a week.
How do you recover after a PR crisis?
Recovery starts when the story stops growing, and it usually takes longer than the crisis itself. Review what happened within a fortnight, while memories are fresh, and be honest about what the plan got wrong.
Track sentiment, search results and what AI assistants now say about you, alongside sales and complaints. Fix the root cause, then tell people what you changed, because a crisis followed by visible change rebuilds trust far faster than a silent return to business as usual. Finally, look after the team who handled it. Our community management training covers moderation and wellbeing for exactly that reason.
My view on this: most PR crises are self-inflicted
Looking back at my 2023 list, most of those crises were not bad luck. Energy firms celebrated profits during a cost of living crisis. P&O chose not to consult. Bud Light could not decide what it believed. The communications made them worse, but the decisions caused them.
So my advice is less about clever statements and more about asking the awkward question before you act. How will this look to the people it affects? If that question had been asked in a few boardrooms, I would have had a much shorter article to write. For a wider look at the risks of social media generally, my fifteen disadvantages of social media covers the rest.
Has your organisation ever actually rehearsed its crisis plan?
Frequently asked questions about PR crises
How long does a PR crisis last?
The acute phase of most PR crises lasts between one day and a couple of weeks, but the reputational effects can last for years. Coverage stays in search results and AI answers, so recovery work often runs for months after the headlines stop.
What is a holding statement in a crisis?
A holding statement is a short, pre-approved message that acknowledges a problem before you have all the facts. It says what you know, that you are taking it seriously, and when people will hear more from you.
Should a business respond to a crisis on social media or with a press statement?
Usually both, starting with the platform where the story broke. Use social media for speed and visibility, then publish a fuller statement on your website or newsroom that every channel and journalist can point to.
Should you delete negative comments during a PR crisis?
No, you should not delete fair criticism, because screenshots survive and deleting looks like a cover-up. Remove only abuse, threats or illegal content, in line with a moderation policy you can explain publicly.
Who should be on a crisis management team?
A crisis team should include a senior decision-maker, comms and social media, customer service, legal, HR and operations. Each person needs a deputy, because crises rarely happen at convenient times.
Get your crisis plan tested before you need it
If you have a crisis plan that nobody has practised, or no plan at all, we can help. We run crisis management training and live simulations for comms, social and leadership teams, and we tailor every scenario to your sector. Get in touch and I will send over what is involved.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
