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Q4 Crisis Review: When Systems Fail Before People Do
(MENAFN- PRovoke)
The biggest corporate crises of 2025's final quarter were not defined by a rogue executive, a misjudged social post or a bungled holding statement. They were defined by systems that failed quietly and/or repeatedly, often long before crisis response teams were ever convened.
The most serious cases in Q4 underline this point brutally. In aviation, the UPS plane crash forced Boeing and UPS to confront not just a tragic loss of life, but the reputational consequences of decisions taken years earlier and risks that were known, assessed and tolerated. UBS, meanwhile, found itself dragged back into the long-running“tuna bonds” scandal, a reminder that acquisitions do not erase history, and that governance failures have an exceptionally long half-life. Even the UK's Office for Budget Responsibility, an institution built on independence and credibility, learned that a single operational lapse can puncture trust when the stakes are political, financial and immediate.
Further down our review of 13 crises from around the world, the spotlight shifts from inherited risk to modern, manufactured ones. Cybersecurity and infrastructure failures at Qantas, Cloudflare and AWS showed how dependent businesses have become on complex, interconnected systems, and how quickly operational fragility translates into reputational exposure. In these cases, transparency and leadership mattered, but they could not fully offset the sense that resilience had been overestimated and safeguards under-tested.
Artificial intelligence and automation were a defining fault line in many cases: Deloitte's citation errors and the MyJobQuote“expert” scandal both show what happens when speed, scale and SEO thinking outpace verification and human judgement. AI did not create these crises on its own, but it accelerated them, amplified them and stripped away plausible deniability.
Cultural misjudgements also proved costly. Sky Sports' ill-fated Halo launch and Arc'teryx's environmental blunder show how quickly well-intentioned strategies unravel when audience insight, internal challenge and local context are treated as secondary considerations.
Values and leadership were tested starkly at Campbell's Soup and AIG, where executive behaviour and internal handling mattered more than any external messaging. These cases reinforce a recurring truth: organisations are judged less by their stated principles than by how they act when employees raise uncomfortable issues, or when senior appointments become reputational liabilities.
Across the quarter, some organisations responded quickly and competently once the spotlight was on them. Others compounded their problems through silence or defensiveness. But the overarching pattern is clear: by the time crisis communicators leaps into action, the most important reputational decisions have often already been made, in terms of governance structures, risk tolerance, incentives and oversight.
The defining lesson of Q4 is not that organisations need faster reactions or slicker statements, but that in an AI-accelerated, low-trust environment, governance, verification and human judgement are no longer back-office concerns. They are frontline reputation issues: when they fail, crisis communications can only do so much.
1. UPS Crash Puts Boeing's Safety Judgement Back Under the Microscope
Boeing has become all too familiar in our crisis reviews, not because of routine corporate blunders or PR missteps, but because these episodes keep involving devastating loss of life. This time, the aerospace giant is included for its role in last year's UPS plane crash that left 15 people dead.
The crash, which occurred in November in Louisville, Kentucky, had all the elements that make aviation disasters so difficult to comprehend - a routine cargo flight, a catastrophic mechanical failure during takeoff, and critical information that only came into focus after the fact.
The aircraft lost an engine moments after takeoff, sending the plane crashing into a nearby neighborhood. The crash, which killed three crew members and 12 people on the ground, was the deadliest UPS Airlines crash in the cargo carrier's nearly 40-year history.
On its own, that would already be a profound human tragedy. But for Boeing, the reputational fallout didn't end there.
Although the aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, Boeing inherited responsibility for the model after acquiring McDonnell Douglas in 1997 - and the safety decisions at issue here were made by Boeing itself.
The National Transportation Safety Board has since determined that the aircraft lost the engine after a critical mounting component failed. Boeing flagged the issue after documenting four previous failures of that component in 2011, but“determined it would not result in a safety of flight condition,” according to the Associated Press.
In other words, Boeing knew the same component had failed four times before and still did not treat the risk as safety-critical.
“This is a catastrophic say-do disconnect with fatal consequences. Boeing knew the part failed four times. They knew an upgraded part existed. They determined it was 'not a safety of flight condition.' Yet 15 people are dead,” said FWD Strategies CEO Bob Osmond.“This is the ultimate reputation risk: when a brand promise (safety, engineering excellence) is undermined by your actions (flying planes with known defects to preserve profit margins).”
Responsibility also lies with UPS, which the NTSB flagged for maintenance lapses and for continuing to operate the aircraft without detecting fatigue cracking in the component.“This isn't a crisis response failure - it's a values failure. Boeing and UPS both had all the information they needed to ground these planes years ago,” Osmond said.
Crisis communications experts were critical of both companies' response, saying they relied too heavily on corporate statements when chief executives should have been the public faces of their organizations.
“One of the most damaging mistakes leaders make in a crisis is disappearing from the public when their presence matters most, believing that written statements can substitute for leadership,” said Fenton's issue advocacy and crisis management lead Erik Olvera.“When senior executives don't step forward quickly and visibly, they're not just suggesting a lack of empathy - they're creating a vacuum that others will fill. Leadership in a crisis isn't about having all the answers, but it is about demonstrating three things immediately - that they're taking action, that they care, and that they are responsive to the people affected.
“Fifteen people lost their lives in the UPS crash in November - three crew members and 12 people on the ground, including a three-year-old child and her grandfather. Families were grieving. A community was traumatized. Local businesses were destroyed. In moments like these, people need to see that leadership understands the weight of what's happened, not through a statement on a website, but by showing up."
He added:“Families wondered whether anyone at the company truly grasped the magnitude of their loss, employees sought reassurance, and customers questioned their loyalty to the brand. Those questions don't disappear once a leader finally steps forward - they linger, turning bad communications decisions into lasting reputational damage and carrying costs the company will bear for years.”-Diana Marszalek
2. UBS Inherits the Long Shadow of Credit Suisse's Tuna Bonds Scandal
The origins of the crisis that hit Swiss banking giant UBS in the fourth quarter of 2025 date back more than a decade to a time when Credit Suisse-which UBS now owns-was an independent entity, thus reinforcing a lesson many other companies have learned about the dangers of inheriting legal and financial liabilities when making acquisitions.
The charges filed by Swiss prosecutors at the end of November relate to alleged organizational“deficiencies” linked to a $2 billion deal in 2013 in which Mozambique - one of the world's poorest countries-borrowed heavily from international investors to fund maritime security projects and a state tuna fishing fleet-which explains how the crisis came to be known as the“tuna bonds” scandal..
Swiss courts have previously suggested that UBS could be held liable for the actions of Credit Suisse, but that question remains open. Nevertheless, there's little doubt that UBS it's going to take a reputational hit now that the case is back in the headlines.
“As the case heads to Criminal Court, it serves as a reminder of how past scandals can haunt even rescued institutions,” notes law firm Lloyd Gray Whitehead & Monroe.
Says Lukasz Bochenek, CEO of Leidar, an international reputation management company with its headquarters in Switzerland:“The G of ESG can create highly potent long-term reputational crises.
“The tuna bond crisis is a very good example how corporate governance issues can impact the global reputation of a company, in this case Credit Suisse. And the impact has spread, now also effecting UBS, the new owner of Credit Suisse.”
According to Bochenek,“The continuing legal case in Switzerland, the bank's home market, means the story is set to continue, requiring UBS to carry out a reputation management programme which must necessarily include both crisis communications and litigation communication. They need to go hand-in-hand because the legal proceedings inevitably have an impact on corporate reputation.” -Paul Holmes
3. OBR Budget Leak Strikes at the Heart of Institutional Trust
"You had one job". That would be a reasonable critique of the UK Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) following its leak – via an unprotected URL – of UK chancellor Rachel Reeves' entire Budget speech, an hour before she was due to deliver it on November 26 last year.
The OBR described the unprecedented leak as“the worst failure in our 15-year history”, leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch said it made Britain look like“a shambolic, laughing stock” and the prime minister called the leak“a serious error... involving market-sensitive information”.
After a prolonged pre-budget period, which took flag-flying of potential measures to new levels and involved no small amount of flip-flopping, the sight of MPs heckling a crestfallen Chancellor with“just skip to the end... we've already read it” was matched only by that of the BBC's political editor, Chris Mason, sitting with his head in his hands in disbelief. As one analyst from AJ Bell put it,“the entire contents of the Budget being accidentally published by the OBR was perhaps a fitting end to the most leaked fiscal event in living memory”.
I've often argued – and there is plenty of evidence to support it – that character-led scandals invariably eat capability-led operational crises for breakfast in terms of the duration and depth of their reputational and relational jeopardy. However, a leak of this kind – no matter how inadvertent – is a striking exception to that general rule.
The incident most certainly struck at the heart of the OBR's fundamental value proposition of independence, rigour, and security. Against that backdrop, some have rightly praised the organisation for the speed of its acknowledgment, the scope and rigour of its investigation, the transparency of its findings, and the degree of responsibility and accountability it took, not least through the resignation of chair Richard Hughes, four days later.
However, with the investigation finding that its March 2025 Economic and Fiscal Outlook had also been accessed inappropriately, the political, media and market ripple effects are certain to have wrought considerable damage to OBR's standing and reputation, providing red meat to those opposed to its role and very existence. If ever Stephen R Covey's famous maxim that you can't talk your way out of a problem you behaved your way into felt fitting, this is probably it - no matter how speedy and accountable the crisis communications response. -Rod Cartwright
4. Qantas Cyber Attack Tests Trust as Crisis Playbooks Fall Short
Last year, Australian airline Qantas Airlines experienced a severe cyber-attack that significantly impacted its operations and raised concerns about the security of customer data. The incident resulted in disruptions to flight schedules, with many passengers encountering delays and cancellations. The airline promptly initiated emergency protocols to address the breach and safeguard its systems while informing affected travellers about the situation.
In response to the cyber-attack, Qantas undertook an extensive investigation to assess the extent of the breach and determine the necessary actions to restore its operations. The airline worked closely with cybersecurity experts and law enforcement agencies to mitigate the risk and ensure that passenger data remained secure. Despite these efforts, the incident highlighted vulnerabilities in airline cybersecurity, prompting discussions about the need for enhanced protection measures in the aviation industry.
The aftermath of the attack also raised concerns among travellers regarding the airline's ability to safeguard personal information. Qantas faced scrutiny not only for the immediate operational disruptions but also for the potential long-term implications for customer trust.
“The breach came at a poor time for the airline, which has spent the past two years rebuilding its once-famous status as a most-loved brand,” said James Hutchinson, CEO of Sling & Stone.“Its response was well-executed by most standards, but show that the traditional crisis comms playbook is quickly becoming outdated when information and misinformation can spread globally in seconds.”
He added that much of the conversation - and therefore perception - resonated primarily on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Reddit, yet much of Qantas' response was understandably concentrated on traditional media.“Add to that the misstep of using AI to generate customer communications, and it's clear that the road to regaining customer trust in the face of a data breach is harder than ever,” he said.
Hutchinson added that brands need to meet customers where they are - not just in traditional, top-down forums like media or email, but also in the forums and platforms where that information (and misinformation) is often spread first.“While the crisis comms playbook still has its place, it is no longer tethered to the news cycle and could continue to have long-held ramifications if brands don't remain authentic to their customers in the longer term,” he said.
Adding to his point, Jo Scard, CEO and founder of Fifty Acres noted that the Qantas breach really reinforces that cybersecurity incidents are no longer a question of if but when, particularly for large, highly networked organisations.“What matters most in a crisis of this kind is not only the strength of technical defences, but the quality of leadership, preparedness and decision-making once an incident occurs,” she said.
“One of the key lessons from the handling of this case is the importance of clear, timely and consistent communication that acknowledges the impact on customers, being upfront about what's known and what isn't, and avoids over-reliance on legal or procedural responses alone,” she added.
Scard went on to say that ultimately, audiences and stakeholders want reassurance that an organisation has taken responsibility, learned from the experience and strengthened its systems, including third-party governance, to prevent a repeat.“Trust isn't rebuilt through statements of compliance, but when people can clearly see that things are being done differently,” she said. -Camillia Dass
5. More CEO Impropriety Forces AIG to Change Course
Inappropriate sexual relationships have been an ongoing theme over the past few crisis reviews but few escalated as quickly or embroiled as many prominent institutions as the one involving former Lloyds of London chief executive John Neal, whose relationship with his former head of corporate affairs hit the headlines in November.
After the news broke that Neal would not be joining American insurance company AIG, as previously announced, it was soon revealed that the world's leading insurance market had hired lawyers to investigate potential failings in its governance around the promotion of an executive during Neal's tenure.
Soon after, it was revealed that the executive involved was a former press secretary within New Zealand's Governor-General office who had served as head of corporate affairs at Lloyds--a revelation that insured the crisis would make headlines on three continents and create reputational challenges for two major institutions.
Lloyd's Market Association chief executive Sheila Cameron Took to LinkedIn to warn of the reputational damage inflicted:“The widely reported news of alleged failures of process and inappropriate behaviour by former senior individuals at Lloyd's is upsetting. It is also hurtful to all of us who love and care for the community that makes up this market, and for the many good people who will feel our industry's reputation has been tarnished by the alleged poor behaviors.”
Michael Gonzalez, SVP of corporate communications at Clarity Global, Suggests that someone with a focus on reputation should be involved in hiring decisions:“The fundamental mistake was the lack of alignment between HR and communications from the outset.
“HR focuses on capability, experience and process compliance, whereas communications looks at senior appointments through a reputational and external-perception lens. Had comms been involved earlier, they may have identified the risk that this appointment would not withstand public and media scrutiny, which could have influenced the decision before it reached the announcement stage.
“The reputational damage for AIG isn't just in withdrawing the announcement, but also in having publicly committed to a candidate who then became untenable.”-Paul Holmes
6. Campbell's Soup Undermined by Executive Remarks and Retaliation Claims
Campbell's Soup is about as quintessentially Americana as a food brand can get, having appeared in everything from WWII rations to Andy Warhol paintings - to say nothing of that green bean casserole.
In its nearly 160-year history, the brand has positioned itself as a solidly cross-class pantry staple, trading on the comfort and confidence that come with putting a warm, accessible, dependable product on the table. That's why an executive's recent characterization of the soup as“for poor people” went against everything the brand has historically stood for.
The issue stems from a November 2024 meeting that former employee Robert Garza says he recorded with the company's chief information security officer, during which the executive allegedly made disparaging comments about poor people and Indian coworkers, calling them“idiots.” Garza also alleges the VP, Martin Bally, panned Campbell's products for using“bioengineered meat,” saying he wouldn't want to“eat a piece of chicken that came from a 3-D printer.”
In a discrimination lawsuit filed in November 2025, Garza, a cybersecurity analyst, said his employment was“abruptly terminated” after he reported the conversation to his boss the previous January, according to The Washington Post. Also in late November, Bally was fired following an internal review, after the recording went public.
Campbell's also put out a statement, saying Bally's“comments were vulgar, offensive and false, and we apologize for the hurt they have caused. This behavior does not reflect our values and the culture of our company, and we will not tolerate that kind of language under any circumstances.” The company also vouched for the quality of its products and ingredients.
Industry watchers say Campbell's did the right thing by moving quickly to fire Bally once they determined the voice on the recording was indeed his. But it made other blunders.
“Campbell's fired Martin Bally within days of his recorded rant going viral. But Robert Garza reported the same behavior internally in January and was terminated twenty days later. No investigation,” says Bully Pulpit International partner Bradley Akuburio.“That disconnect says a lot. The company responded to visibility, not values.”
FWD Strategies CEO Bob Osmond offered a similar take, saying“the retaliation is the real crisis.”
“Campbell's responded to symptoms but missed the disease. They fired the executive and defended their product. Firing Bally took no courage because the recording forced their hand,” said Osmond.“Campbell's says they value integrity and respect. Their actions suggest they value keeping things quiet. That's the reputation gap, and it's the one that erodes trust with employees, who are your best brand advocates.”
Another blunder was Campbell's response focusing more on the quality of its products than its values or company culture. Bloomberg columnist Beth Kowitt wrote in an article, Campbell's Vulgar Leak Required More Than Defending Its Soup.
“Examining the ways Campbell's has continued to respond to the fiasco offers some clues as to how the company might have ended up in this position,” she wrote.“Sign No. 1 is the following comment from a spokesperson: 'Keep in mind, the alleged comments heard on the audio were made by a person in IT, who has nothing to do with how we make our food.'”
“This is not the defense that Campbell's thinks it is. The suggestion here is that since Bally worked in information security, not food, he doesn't have a full understanding of how the soup gets made. But what's really being said is that not everyone at the company is expected to live the company's values or understand what it does – that it's okay to stick to your narrow lane and remove yourself from the organization's broader mission,” she wrote.
“The crisis isn't about chicken. It's about whether leadership lives the values they claim, and whether employees can raise concerns without becoming casualties,” said Akuburio.“As a rule, people are universally allergic to hypocrisy. Even conservatively, this situation came painfully close to that."- Diana Marszalek
7. Sky Sports' Halo Channel Scores an Own Goal
When Sky Sports launched Halo, a new female-focused TikTok channel, it was positioned as a progressive move: an inclusive, dedicated platform for women to enjoy and explore content from all sports, while amplifying female voices and perspectives. Within three days of its debut in November, the channel was shuttered.
The backlash was swift and intense. Instead of being welcomed by the women it sought to attract, Halo was widely criticised online as patronising and stereotypical and, in the words of one user,“unbelievably sexist”. Content referencing“hot girl walks”, matcha lattes and pastel aesthetics was seen as infantilising female sports fans and trivialising their passion for sport. The decision to describe Halo as the“little sister” of Sky Sports proved especially inflammatory, reinforcing long-standing frustrations that women's sport is still treated as an extension of men's rather than an entity in its own right.
Compounding the issue, many of the clips featured male athletes rather than women's sport, undermining the channel's stated purpose and fuelling accusations that Halo prioritised trend-led tone over meaningful representation. Prominent voices within women's football and sports media quickly weighed in, while spoof posts mocking Halo's style circulated widely, accelerating reputational damage.
Sky's response came quickly. Three days after launch, the broadcaster announced it was stopping all activity on the account, admitting it did not get it right and that it had listened to feedback. Halo posts were deleted, and Sky declined to offer further comment beyond a short public statement.
From a crisis management standpoint, Sky's immediate response was competent. The organisation moved fast, avoided defensiveness, acknowledged fault without qualification and made a decisive call to close the channel entirely. There was no attempt to explain away intent or blame audience misunderstanding. In purely reactive terms, the response limited further escalation.
However, the deeper reputational issue lay in the strategic thinking behind Halo itself. As Kate Hartley, co-founder of public affairs consultancy Polpeo, put it:“I'm still raging about this. What was Sky thinking? Halo was launched as the 'lil sis of Sky Sports' (sic), which immediately infantilises the channel and its audience.
“I understand Sky wants to draw more women viewers into sports. But the way to do this is not through stereotypes and patronising content ('How the matcha + hot girl walk combo hits' as the caption over a video of Erling Haaland sprinting towards goal sums it up). I can't believe they consulted any women in sport on this, who might just have said: 'I have an idea, why not use your power to champion women in sport instead of dumbing them down?'
“It was billed as a 'safe, positive space for women', which highlights the main Sky channels aren't safe or positive, presumably. This is the core problem here. Women don't need to be siphoned off to a pink, butterfly-covered TikTok channel to look for their sports news. We need better representation on the main sports channels. And if those channels don't provide a safe, positive space for women, then fix that problem.”
Hartley's critique captures why Halo failed so publicly and so quickly. The issue was not Sky's intention to engage female audiences, but the reductive assumptions underpinning that engagement. Halo misread its audience and inadvertently reinforced the very stereotypes the sports industry has spent decades trying to dismantle.
The episode also highlights a recurring communications pitfall: confusing inclusive with separate. As Sport England's This Girl Can marketing director Kate Dale argued in a Guardian letter responding to the controversy, representation matters because it shapes belonging. When marketing does not reflect the diversity of women's experiences, it risks alienating the very audiences it hopes to reach.
For communications leaders, Halo is a reminder that no amount of reactive agility can compensate for weak cultural insight upstream. Sky's rapid shutdown helped contain the crisis, but the reputational damage was largely self-inflicted. Listening after launch mattered, but listening before would have mattered more.- Maja Pawinska Sims
8. Cloudflare and AWS Outage Chaos
Cloudflare, which many of the world's websites and apps depend on to function, had a rocky end to 2025, suffering a series of global outages that left thousands of sites briefly unreachable.
The first occurred in November, when a software system failure took down the likes of X, ChatGPT, Uber, Spotify and OpenAI, along with countless other sites and services, for several hours. It was Cloudflare's widest spread outage in years.
Less than a month later, the web infrastructure provider suffered a second blow with another outage that took sites including LinkedIn and Zoom down with it, albeit for a shorter time.
And Cloudflare wasn't the only company to experience outages of this scale. Its problems came on the heels of a similar one that hit Amazon Web Services in October, which also disrupted thousands of businesses worldwide.
The ramifications are huge. Industry analysts say outages of this scale can translate into hundreds of millions of dollars in business losses across affected companies, as well as reputational damage caused by being unavailable, even for relatively short periods. In turn, the incidents highlight the risks facing businesses that are dependent on the likes of Cloudflare and AWS to keep operations up and running.
“From a technology perspective, the outage reminded us of the risks associated with a 'single point of failure,'” said Katie Huang Shin, Allison Worldwide's global president of technology.“With millions of customers around the world relying on Cloudflare and its services, the disruptions across supply chains, organizations and revenue streams were estimated at hundreds of millions to low billions of dollars - something no technology company can ignore in today's hyperconnected, cloud- and edge-oriented operating environment.”
To its credit, Cloudflare responded appropriately to the outage.“The company did not blame AWS or other partners for the outage. They took responsibility, and the 'we are sorry' posture was clear and present in its communication, including Cloudflare's leadership,” Shin said.“The transparent, leader-led acknowledgement, along with the company's post-mortem reflection on the incident, helped mitigate further damage to the brand and reputation. These days, audiences can deal with uncertainty, but they are less forgiving of silence.”
We may also have to accept that problems are part of our tech-driven world.“This is just part of the way the work looks now,” said one expert, adding that the consumers and businesses who rely on infrastructure providers may have been more forgiving of the outages than the media and policymakers.
“Breakdowns are part of technology life,” he said.“But companies need to show how serious they are about working to make them less frequent and, over time, will be better for doing so.”- Diana Marszalek
9. Cision Investigates as MyJobQuote's Expert Network Unravels
At the end of 2025, a sprawling network of apparently non-existent“experts”, complete with crude AI-generated headshots and unverifiable credentials, triggered one of the most uncomfortable credibility crises the PR and media industries have faced in years.
In December, Press Gazette revealed that more than 600 published articles across major UK news outlets featured advice attributed to a stable of home and garden experts supplied by MyJobQuote, a UK marketing platform for tradespeople. The experts – spanning interior design, gardening and construction – appeared prolific but oddly elusive: no LinkedIn profiles, no social media presence, and no evidence they could actually be hired.
One supposed expert, Fiona Jenkins, whose image was assessed as 99% likely to be AI-generated by detector Pangram, had been quoted more than 170 times in British media. In several cases, the same experts appeared repeatedly across titles owned by publishers including the BBC, Reach and News Corp.
As scrutiny mounted, publishers began quietly removing the affected stories, many now returning 404 errors. Reach was the only publisher to respond publicly, with chief content officer David Higgerson acknowledging:“The industry will need to work together to develop new ways to manage these growing threats.”
At the centre of the controversy sat Cision, the US-based PR services giant whose press release distribution platform hosted dozens of MyJobQuote releases and syndicated them into the media ecosystem, including Google News. Following the Press Gazette investigation and a growing industry backlash, Cision confirmed it was reviewing MyJobQuote's activity and compliance with its terms of service.
“Cision takes allegations of misleading or fabricated information seriously,” a company spokesperson said, noting that customers are prohibited from submitting false or intentionally misleading content. The company subsequently removed dozens of MyJobQuote releases from its platform, though at time of publication others remained live.
By contrast, MyJobQuote itself remained silent. Despite repeated attempts to seek clarification, none of the 15 named experts have come forward to verify their credentials or contest the reporting. The company's refusal to engage has only intensified suspicion and criticism.
The episode has already begun to change newsroom behaviour. Press Gazette reported that PR consultants were finding more journalists demanding proof of expertise, including LinkedIn profiles and education details, before agreeing to include comment. Others described retroactively questioning sources they had previously trusted.
For Richard Bagnall, co-founder of CommsClarity Consulting and a former leader of measurement and evaluation firms including Carma and Prime Research (acquired by Cision in 2017), the crisis exposes a systemic vulnerability.
“This situation highlights what happens when automation, SEO tactics and scaled distribution outpace verification,” Bagnall said.“'Expert comment' is being offered as a high-volume commodity, but trust is now its limiting factor. Once unverifiable sources circulate at scale, the damage goes well beyond one organisation. It undermines confidence in legitimate experts, forces publishers into cumbersome and expensive checks, increasing friction across the entire media ecosystem. The result is a growing trust deficit, not just in sources, but in content itself.”
Bagnall also warned that even the investigative tools used to identify fake content remain unreliable.“AI image and content detectors are renowned as being imperfect. Without care, we slide towards a world where neither content nor the mechanisms used to assess it can be trusted. In this environment, credibility has to be rigorously earned. It cannot be inferred from brand, scale, or technology.”
On Cision's handling of the issue, Bagnall noted that the company followed basic crisis-response principles: acknowledging the issue, referencing standards, launching a review and beginning to remove content. However, he argued the response leaned heavily on a“platform not publisher” defence.
“When your organisation operates at the centre of distribution, stakeholders expect stewardship and governance, not just scale,” he said.“That reassurance comes from visible, system-level guardrails, including strong verification of expert networks, early pattern detection and fast escalation.”
By contrast, he added, MyJobQuote's silence was“the worst possible response”.“In the absence of proof, accountability or explanation, trust collapses and stories escalate. This is exactly what has happened here.”
For both hacks and flacks, the lesson is unavoidable: in an AI-accelerated, low-trust environment, credibility can no longer be assumed but has to be proved.- Maja Pawinska Sims
10. Deloitte's AI Citation Errors Raise Questions About Trust and Quality Control
When a Deloitte report for the Australian government was found to contain apparent AI-generated errors, including fabricated references, it should have been a wake-up call for the firm. The fact that a similar problem then surfaced in a government-commissioned report in Canada made it look less like an isolated lapse and more like a deeper quality-control problem.
Deloitte's reputational fallout dates to October, when a Sydney university researcher alerted the media that the firm's 237-page report paid for by the Australian government was“full of fabricated references.” And the report, which the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations had on its website since the previous July, included more than just bad citations; a made-up quote from a federal court judgement and references to research that did not exist were in there as well.
To its credit, Deloitte Australia was upfront in responding to the high-profile blunder; the firm acknowledged the errors, declared them unacceptable, revised the report, and partially refunded the government.
It seems, though, that Deloitte's problems in Australia may have been part of a broader quality-control problem, as the firm came under fire in November for similar errors in a roughly C$1.6 million healthcare report commissioned by a Canadian provincial government.
But Deloitte Canada wasn't as effusive in its mea culpa as its Australian counterpart, saying in a statement that it“firmly stands behind the recommendations put forward in our report." and that“AI was not used to write the report; it was selectively used to support a small number of research citations. We are fully responsible for the quality of our work, including the accuracy of report citations.” And though Canadian pols seized the opportunity to slam Deloitte in the press, the fallout for the company was relatively tempered. In December, the federal government defended its C$1.1 million contract with Deloitte for advice on, of all things, deploying AI.
Critics agree that“there is no excuse” for these sorts of errors and, as one industry watcher said,“You can't blame any mistakes in your deliverables on AI.” That, however, doesn't mean they are unexpected, given the multitude of pressures on consultants to turnaround these kinds of reports.
“Was it the use of AI or the pressure to deliver quickly,” he said, likening the AI-generated errors to the kind of blunders junior employees could make.“Before AI, there were probably reports delivered with other mistakes in them, but they weren't headline news,” he said.
These incidents, however, are bigger than just Deloitte.“Artificial intelligence already has deep trust issues, and situations like this aren't helping,” said Josh Cobden, executive VP of Toronto-based Proof Strategies, noting that the firm's research shows 43% of Canadians feel content produced by AI is less trustworthy than other.
“Organizations that use AI, especially those that trade in the knowledge and ideas economy, would do well to adopt some of the same skepticism as many Canadians, and as the old saying goes, 'don't believe everything you read.' Artificial intelligence still needs humans,” he said.- Diana Marszalek
11. Coca-Cola Caught in the Crossfire of Rage-Bait Disinformation
The Oxford University Press made rage-bait its word of the year for 2025 and public relations professionals have already seen a number of crises this year that had their origins in the social media outrage machinery. The latest of these sought to drag Coca-Cola into the right-wing freak out over the NFL's selection of Puerto Rican rapper bad Bunny to perform at this year's Super Bowl.
As is often the case, the false claim that Coca-Cola would terminate its sponsorship of the Super bowl appears to have originated with an AI-written post at an anonymous fake news site in a story headlined“Coca-Cola vs. The NFL: Inside the Corporate Ultimatum That Could Redefine the Super Bowl Halftime Show.” The story q Quoted the companies CEO James Quincey who supposedly said,“I will end my sponsorship of the Super Bowl if they let Bad Bunny perform at halftime.”
But a Coca-Cola spokesman told fake news monitoring site NewsGuard,“This online rumor is fabricated and completely false... we don't sponsor the Super Bowl.” The story was also debunked by Snopes and a Yahoo fact check.
Nevertheless, the claim spread widely on Facebook and other social media sites and was delivered into millions of feeds by“engagement farming” tactics Taking advantage of algorithms that increasingly reward sensational disinformation. It seems likely that the false claim was seen by many people who were never exposed to the facts.
Save one corporate affairs executive,“we've seen a number of crises for companies like cracker barrel and American eagle driven by the online outrage machine. Even when the stories are transparently false, companies need to respond, and even then they can be dragged into divisive debates by those who would prefer the stories to be true.
“Companies need to constantly monitor what is being said and how these stories spread and need to have a process to decide when to intervene.”-Paul Holmes
12. IndiGo Naps At The Wheel
Last December, Indian airline IndiGo faced a significant operational crisis, leading to widespread flight cancellations that affected hundreds of thousands of passengers. The turmoil began when the airline was unable to meet new crew-rostering regulations aimed at improving pilot rest schedules, resulting in more than 1,000 cancellations in just one day. This sudden disruption left many passengers stranded, causing missed events such as weddings and funerals and raising concerns about the airline's reliability and customer service.
The predicament stemmed from IndiGo's failure to effectively plan for the implementation of new duty rules, which were announced nearly two years prior. While other airlines complied with the changes, IndiGo admitted it was not adequately prepared, stating that it lacked sufficient rested staff to operate its schedule. The airline's aggressive expansion strategy, which included launching new international routes, may have diverted attention from these critical operational adjustments, leading to severe mismanagement of its flight operations.
As a response to the crisis, IndiGo secured a temporary exemption from some new rules and committed to stabilising operations. However, the airline's reputation, once synonymous with reliable air travel in India, has come under threat, especially after competing airlines began to capitalise on IndiGo's misfortunes by offering additional flights to affected passengers.
“The IndiGo situation was a reminder of how quickly strain shows up when scale, people, and planning fall out of sync,” said Nitin Mantri, President of Asia-Pacific, We.“Regulatory changes were known, but the way they played out on the ground exposed gaps in readiness and human capacity.”
Mantri went on to say that the learning is straightforward.“Compliance cannot remain an exercise on paper. Organisations need to test plans against how work actually happens, well before changes take effect,” he said.
He added that it also demonstrated how trust is shaped during disruption.“Passengers felt the impact first, and stabilising operations was only part of the task. Rebuilding confidence required visible corrective action and clear, honest communication. From a communications and leadership standpoint, acknowledging impact early, reducing pressure where possible, and letting action lead the message are critical to effective crisis handling,” said Mantri. -Camillia Dass
13. Arc'teryx Makes Explosive Environmental Blunder
In September last year, outdoor brand Arc'teryx faced significant backlash after hosting a fireworks display in Tibet, which raised concerns about the environmental impacts. The outdoor brand organised the promotional event, called "Rising Dragon," featuring choreographed pyrotechnics along the Himalayan ridgelines. Despite claiming that the materials used were biodegradable and that measures were taken to relocate wildlife, the display drew criticism online for contradicting the company's environmentally conscious image.
Following the negative response, Arc'teryx and the event's artistic director, Cai Guo-Qiang, issued apologies stating that the display did not align with the brand's core values. They acknowledged that the public's criticism highlighted the need for a more careful evaluation of artistic expressions and their environmental implications. The company emphasized its commitment to respecting nature and promised to address the situation directly with Cai and the local team involved.
The incident also prompted an official investigation by local authorities in Shigatse, Tibet, and criticism from the China Advertising Association, which expressed disappointment over the brand's marketing approach. While a county official initially stated that the event complied with environmental standards and did not damage local ecology, the uproar from the public indicated a broader concern about environmental degradation and commercialization in a region sacred to Tibetan Buddhists.
"The underlying problem behind Arc'teryx's crisis is visible in the misalignment between its Weibo and Instagram apology messaging. The global-local messaging gap laid bare a deeper communications and cultural disconnect between the China marketing team and headquarters,” said Nicky Wang, CEO of China, We. Red Bridge.
“In a market that contributes a significant portion of Arc'teryx's global sales, the China team has likely been enjoying substantial autonomy and was simply eager to 'own' the winter moment and dominate share of voice - and the only playbook they reached for was to go big or go home with a stunt,” added Wang.“It is not hard to imagine that the approval process with HQ was light, with an emphasis on partnering with a renewed artist, and that the true nature and implications of the activation were not properly interrogated.”
Wang went on to say that at the moment, it appears their immediate sales have not been significantly affected; however, a repeat incident like this will certainly damage the brand reputation.“To avoid that, Arc'teryx's China brand team and global leadership must start talking more. More importantly, they must start talking in the same language about risk, culture and what the brand should and should not stand for," said Wang. -Camillia Dass
The most serious cases in Q4 underline this point brutally. In aviation, the UPS plane crash forced Boeing and UPS to confront not just a tragic loss of life, but the reputational consequences of decisions taken years earlier and risks that were known, assessed and tolerated. UBS, meanwhile, found itself dragged back into the long-running“tuna bonds” scandal, a reminder that acquisitions do not erase history, and that governance failures have an exceptionally long half-life. Even the UK's Office for Budget Responsibility, an institution built on independence and credibility, learned that a single operational lapse can puncture trust when the stakes are political, financial and immediate.
Further down our review of 13 crises from around the world, the spotlight shifts from inherited risk to modern, manufactured ones. Cybersecurity and infrastructure failures at Qantas, Cloudflare and AWS showed how dependent businesses have become on complex, interconnected systems, and how quickly operational fragility translates into reputational exposure. In these cases, transparency and leadership mattered, but they could not fully offset the sense that resilience had been overestimated and safeguards under-tested.
Artificial intelligence and automation were a defining fault line in many cases: Deloitte's citation errors and the MyJobQuote“expert” scandal both show what happens when speed, scale and SEO thinking outpace verification and human judgement. AI did not create these crises on its own, but it accelerated them, amplified them and stripped away plausible deniability.
Cultural misjudgements also proved costly. Sky Sports' ill-fated Halo launch and Arc'teryx's environmental blunder show how quickly well-intentioned strategies unravel when audience insight, internal challenge and local context are treated as secondary considerations.
Values and leadership were tested starkly at Campbell's Soup and AIG, where executive behaviour and internal handling mattered more than any external messaging. These cases reinforce a recurring truth: organisations are judged less by their stated principles than by how they act when employees raise uncomfortable issues, or when senior appointments become reputational liabilities.
Across the quarter, some organisations responded quickly and competently once the spotlight was on them. Others compounded their problems through silence or defensiveness. But the overarching pattern is clear: by the time crisis communicators leaps into action, the most important reputational decisions have often already been made, in terms of governance structures, risk tolerance, incentives and oversight.
The defining lesson of Q4 is not that organisations need faster reactions or slicker statements, but that in an AI-accelerated, low-trust environment, governance, verification and human judgement are no longer back-office concerns. They are frontline reputation issues: when they fail, crisis communications can only do so much.
1. UPS Crash Puts Boeing's Safety Judgement Back Under the Microscope
Boeing has become all too familiar in our crisis reviews, not because of routine corporate blunders or PR missteps, but because these episodes keep involving devastating loss of life. This time, the aerospace giant is included for its role in last year's UPS plane crash that left 15 people dead.
The crash, which occurred in November in Louisville, Kentucky, had all the elements that make aviation disasters so difficult to comprehend - a routine cargo flight, a catastrophic mechanical failure during takeoff, and critical information that only came into focus after the fact.
The aircraft lost an engine moments after takeoff, sending the plane crashing into a nearby neighborhood. The crash, which killed three crew members and 12 people on the ground, was the deadliest UPS Airlines crash in the cargo carrier's nearly 40-year history.
On its own, that would already be a profound human tragedy. But for Boeing, the reputational fallout didn't end there.
Although the aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, Boeing inherited responsibility for the model after acquiring McDonnell Douglas in 1997 - and the safety decisions at issue here were made by Boeing itself.
The National Transportation Safety Board has since determined that the aircraft lost the engine after a critical mounting component failed. Boeing flagged the issue after documenting four previous failures of that component in 2011, but“determined it would not result in a safety of flight condition,” according to the Associated Press.
In other words, Boeing knew the same component had failed four times before and still did not treat the risk as safety-critical.
“This is a catastrophic say-do disconnect with fatal consequences. Boeing knew the part failed four times. They knew an upgraded part existed. They determined it was 'not a safety of flight condition.' Yet 15 people are dead,” said FWD Strategies CEO Bob Osmond.“This is the ultimate reputation risk: when a brand promise (safety, engineering excellence) is undermined by your actions (flying planes with known defects to preserve profit margins).”
Responsibility also lies with UPS, which the NTSB flagged for maintenance lapses and for continuing to operate the aircraft without detecting fatigue cracking in the component.“This isn't a crisis response failure - it's a values failure. Boeing and UPS both had all the information they needed to ground these planes years ago,” Osmond said.
Crisis communications experts were critical of both companies' response, saying they relied too heavily on corporate statements when chief executives should have been the public faces of their organizations.
“One of the most damaging mistakes leaders make in a crisis is disappearing from the public when their presence matters most, believing that written statements can substitute for leadership,” said Fenton's issue advocacy and crisis management lead Erik Olvera.“When senior executives don't step forward quickly and visibly, they're not just suggesting a lack of empathy - they're creating a vacuum that others will fill. Leadership in a crisis isn't about having all the answers, but it is about demonstrating three things immediately - that they're taking action, that they care, and that they are responsive to the people affected.
“Fifteen people lost their lives in the UPS crash in November - three crew members and 12 people on the ground, including a three-year-old child and her grandfather. Families were grieving. A community was traumatized. Local businesses were destroyed. In moments like these, people need to see that leadership understands the weight of what's happened, not through a statement on a website, but by showing up."
He added:“Families wondered whether anyone at the company truly grasped the magnitude of their loss, employees sought reassurance, and customers questioned their loyalty to the brand. Those questions don't disappear once a leader finally steps forward - they linger, turning bad communications decisions into lasting reputational damage and carrying costs the company will bear for years.”-Diana Marszalek
2. UBS Inherits the Long Shadow of Credit Suisse's Tuna Bonds Scandal
The origins of the crisis that hit Swiss banking giant UBS in the fourth quarter of 2025 date back more than a decade to a time when Credit Suisse-which UBS now owns-was an independent entity, thus reinforcing a lesson many other companies have learned about the dangers of inheriting legal and financial liabilities when making acquisitions.
The charges filed by Swiss prosecutors at the end of November relate to alleged organizational“deficiencies” linked to a $2 billion deal in 2013 in which Mozambique - one of the world's poorest countries-borrowed heavily from international investors to fund maritime security projects and a state tuna fishing fleet-which explains how the crisis came to be known as the“tuna bonds” scandal..
Swiss courts have previously suggested that UBS could be held liable for the actions of Credit Suisse, but that question remains open. Nevertheless, there's little doubt that UBS it's going to take a reputational hit now that the case is back in the headlines.
“As the case heads to Criminal Court, it serves as a reminder of how past scandals can haunt even rescued institutions,” notes law firm Lloyd Gray Whitehead & Monroe.
Says Lukasz Bochenek, CEO of Leidar, an international reputation management company with its headquarters in Switzerland:“The G of ESG can create highly potent long-term reputational crises.
“The tuna bond crisis is a very good example how corporate governance issues can impact the global reputation of a company, in this case Credit Suisse. And the impact has spread, now also effecting UBS, the new owner of Credit Suisse.”
According to Bochenek,“The continuing legal case in Switzerland, the bank's home market, means the story is set to continue, requiring UBS to carry out a reputation management programme which must necessarily include both crisis communications and litigation communication. They need to go hand-in-hand because the legal proceedings inevitably have an impact on corporate reputation.” -Paul Holmes
3. OBR Budget Leak Strikes at the Heart of Institutional Trust
"You had one job". That would be a reasonable critique of the UK Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) following its leak – via an unprotected URL – of UK chancellor Rachel Reeves' entire Budget speech, an hour before she was due to deliver it on November 26 last year.
The OBR described the unprecedented leak as“the worst failure in our 15-year history”, leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch said it made Britain look like“a shambolic, laughing stock” and the prime minister called the leak“a serious error... involving market-sensitive information”.
After a prolonged pre-budget period, which took flag-flying of potential measures to new levels and involved no small amount of flip-flopping, the sight of MPs heckling a crestfallen Chancellor with“just skip to the end... we've already read it” was matched only by that of the BBC's political editor, Chris Mason, sitting with his head in his hands in disbelief. As one analyst from AJ Bell put it,“the entire contents of the Budget being accidentally published by the OBR was perhaps a fitting end to the most leaked fiscal event in living memory”.
I've often argued – and there is plenty of evidence to support it – that character-led scandals invariably eat capability-led operational crises for breakfast in terms of the duration and depth of their reputational and relational jeopardy. However, a leak of this kind – no matter how inadvertent – is a striking exception to that general rule.
The incident most certainly struck at the heart of the OBR's fundamental value proposition of independence, rigour, and security. Against that backdrop, some have rightly praised the organisation for the speed of its acknowledgment, the scope and rigour of its investigation, the transparency of its findings, and the degree of responsibility and accountability it took, not least through the resignation of chair Richard Hughes, four days later.
However, with the investigation finding that its March 2025 Economic and Fiscal Outlook had also been accessed inappropriately, the political, media and market ripple effects are certain to have wrought considerable damage to OBR's standing and reputation, providing red meat to those opposed to its role and very existence. If ever Stephen R Covey's famous maxim that you can't talk your way out of a problem you behaved your way into felt fitting, this is probably it - no matter how speedy and accountable the crisis communications response. -Rod Cartwright
4. Qantas Cyber Attack Tests Trust as Crisis Playbooks Fall Short
Last year, Australian airline Qantas Airlines experienced a severe cyber-attack that significantly impacted its operations and raised concerns about the security of customer data. The incident resulted in disruptions to flight schedules, with many passengers encountering delays and cancellations. The airline promptly initiated emergency protocols to address the breach and safeguard its systems while informing affected travellers about the situation.
In response to the cyber-attack, Qantas undertook an extensive investigation to assess the extent of the breach and determine the necessary actions to restore its operations. The airline worked closely with cybersecurity experts and law enforcement agencies to mitigate the risk and ensure that passenger data remained secure. Despite these efforts, the incident highlighted vulnerabilities in airline cybersecurity, prompting discussions about the need for enhanced protection measures in the aviation industry.
The aftermath of the attack also raised concerns among travellers regarding the airline's ability to safeguard personal information. Qantas faced scrutiny not only for the immediate operational disruptions but also for the potential long-term implications for customer trust.
“The breach came at a poor time for the airline, which has spent the past two years rebuilding its once-famous status as a most-loved brand,” said James Hutchinson, CEO of Sling & Stone.“Its response was well-executed by most standards, but show that the traditional crisis comms playbook is quickly becoming outdated when information and misinformation can spread globally in seconds.”
He added that much of the conversation - and therefore perception - resonated primarily on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Reddit, yet much of Qantas' response was understandably concentrated on traditional media.“Add to that the misstep of using AI to generate customer communications, and it's clear that the road to regaining customer trust in the face of a data breach is harder than ever,” he said.
Hutchinson added that brands need to meet customers where they are - not just in traditional, top-down forums like media or email, but also in the forums and platforms where that information (and misinformation) is often spread first.“While the crisis comms playbook still has its place, it is no longer tethered to the news cycle and could continue to have long-held ramifications if brands don't remain authentic to their customers in the longer term,” he said.
Adding to his point, Jo Scard, CEO and founder of Fifty Acres noted that the Qantas breach really reinforces that cybersecurity incidents are no longer a question of if but when, particularly for large, highly networked organisations.“What matters most in a crisis of this kind is not only the strength of technical defences, but the quality of leadership, preparedness and decision-making once an incident occurs,” she said.
“One of the key lessons from the handling of this case is the importance of clear, timely and consistent communication that acknowledges the impact on customers, being upfront about what's known and what isn't, and avoids over-reliance on legal or procedural responses alone,” she added.
Scard went on to say that ultimately, audiences and stakeholders want reassurance that an organisation has taken responsibility, learned from the experience and strengthened its systems, including third-party governance, to prevent a repeat.“Trust isn't rebuilt through statements of compliance, but when people can clearly see that things are being done differently,” she said. -Camillia Dass
5. More CEO Impropriety Forces AIG to Change Course
Inappropriate sexual relationships have been an ongoing theme over the past few crisis reviews but few escalated as quickly or embroiled as many prominent institutions as the one involving former Lloyds of London chief executive John Neal, whose relationship with his former head of corporate affairs hit the headlines in November.
After the news broke that Neal would not be joining American insurance company AIG, as previously announced, it was soon revealed that the world's leading insurance market had hired lawyers to investigate potential failings in its governance around the promotion of an executive during Neal's tenure.
Soon after, it was revealed that the executive involved was a former press secretary within New Zealand's Governor-General office who had served as head of corporate affairs at Lloyds--a revelation that insured the crisis would make headlines on three continents and create reputational challenges for two major institutions.
Lloyd's Market Association chief executive Sheila Cameron Took to LinkedIn to warn of the reputational damage inflicted:“The widely reported news of alleged failures of process and inappropriate behaviour by former senior individuals at Lloyd's is upsetting. It is also hurtful to all of us who love and care for the community that makes up this market, and for the many good people who will feel our industry's reputation has been tarnished by the alleged poor behaviors.”
Michael Gonzalez, SVP of corporate communications at Clarity Global, Suggests that someone with a focus on reputation should be involved in hiring decisions:“The fundamental mistake was the lack of alignment between HR and communications from the outset.
“HR focuses on capability, experience and process compliance, whereas communications looks at senior appointments through a reputational and external-perception lens. Had comms been involved earlier, they may have identified the risk that this appointment would not withstand public and media scrutiny, which could have influenced the decision before it reached the announcement stage.
“The reputational damage for AIG isn't just in withdrawing the announcement, but also in having publicly committed to a candidate who then became untenable.”-Paul Holmes
6. Campbell's Soup Undermined by Executive Remarks and Retaliation Claims
Campbell's Soup is about as quintessentially Americana as a food brand can get, having appeared in everything from WWII rations to Andy Warhol paintings - to say nothing of that green bean casserole.
In its nearly 160-year history, the brand has positioned itself as a solidly cross-class pantry staple, trading on the comfort and confidence that come with putting a warm, accessible, dependable product on the table. That's why an executive's recent characterization of the soup as“for poor people” went against everything the brand has historically stood for.
The issue stems from a November 2024 meeting that former employee Robert Garza says he recorded with the company's chief information security officer, during which the executive allegedly made disparaging comments about poor people and Indian coworkers, calling them“idiots.” Garza also alleges the VP, Martin Bally, panned Campbell's products for using“bioengineered meat,” saying he wouldn't want to“eat a piece of chicken that came from a 3-D printer.”
In a discrimination lawsuit filed in November 2025, Garza, a cybersecurity analyst, said his employment was“abruptly terminated” after he reported the conversation to his boss the previous January, according to The Washington Post. Also in late November, Bally was fired following an internal review, after the recording went public.
Campbell's also put out a statement, saying Bally's“comments were vulgar, offensive and false, and we apologize for the hurt they have caused. This behavior does not reflect our values and the culture of our company, and we will not tolerate that kind of language under any circumstances.” The company also vouched for the quality of its products and ingredients.
Industry watchers say Campbell's did the right thing by moving quickly to fire Bally once they determined the voice on the recording was indeed his. But it made other blunders.
“Campbell's fired Martin Bally within days of his recorded rant going viral. But Robert Garza reported the same behavior internally in January and was terminated twenty days later. No investigation,” says Bully Pulpit International partner Bradley Akuburio.“That disconnect says a lot. The company responded to visibility, not values.”
FWD Strategies CEO Bob Osmond offered a similar take, saying“the retaliation is the real crisis.”
“Campbell's responded to symptoms but missed the disease. They fired the executive and defended their product. Firing Bally took no courage because the recording forced their hand,” said Osmond.“Campbell's says they value integrity and respect. Their actions suggest they value keeping things quiet. That's the reputation gap, and it's the one that erodes trust with employees, who are your best brand advocates.”
Another blunder was Campbell's response focusing more on the quality of its products than its values or company culture. Bloomberg columnist Beth Kowitt wrote in an article, Campbell's Vulgar Leak Required More Than Defending Its Soup.
“Examining the ways Campbell's has continued to respond to the fiasco offers some clues as to how the company might have ended up in this position,” she wrote.“Sign No. 1 is the following comment from a spokesperson: 'Keep in mind, the alleged comments heard on the audio were made by a person in IT, who has nothing to do with how we make our food.'”
“This is not the defense that Campbell's thinks it is. The suggestion here is that since Bally worked in information security, not food, he doesn't have a full understanding of how the soup gets made. But what's really being said is that not everyone at the company is expected to live the company's values or understand what it does – that it's okay to stick to your narrow lane and remove yourself from the organization's broader mission,” she wrote.
“The crisis isn't about chicken. It's about whether leadership lives the values they claim, and whether employees can raise concerns without becoming casualties,” said Akuburio.“As a rule, people are universally allergic to hypocrisy. Even conservatively, this situation came painfully close to that."- Diana Marszalek
7. Sky Sports' Halo Channel Scores an Own Goal
When Sky Sports launched Halo, a new female-focused TikTok channel, it was positioned as a progressive move: an inclusive, dedicated platform for women to enjoy and explore content from all sports, while amplifying female voices and perspectives. Within three days of its debut in November, the channel was shuttered.
The backlash was swift and intense. Instead of being welcomed by the women it sought to attract, Halo was widely criticised online as patronising and stereotypical and, in the words of one user,“unbelievably sexist”. Content referencing“hot girl walks”, matcha lattes and pastel aesthetics was seen as infantilising female sports fans and trivialising their passion for sport. The decision to describe Halo as the“little sister” of Sky Sports proved especially inflammatory, reinforcing long-standing frustrations that women's sport is still treated as an extension of men's rather than an entity in its own right.
Compounding the issue, many of the clips featured male athletes rather than women's sport, undermining the channel's stated purpose and fuelling accusations that Halo prioritised trend-led tone over meaningful representation. Prominent voices within women's football and sports media quickly weighed in, while spoof posts mocking Halo's style circulated widely, accelerating reputational damage.
Sky's response came quickly. Three days after launch, the broadcaster announced it was stopping all activity on the account, admitting it did not get it right and that it had listened to feedback. Halo posts were deleted, and Sky declined to offer further comment beyond a short public statement.
From a crisis management standpoint, Sky's immediate response was competent. The organisation moved fast, avoided defensiveness, acknowledged fault without qualification and made a decisive call to close the channel entirely. There was no attempt to explain away intent or blame audience misunderstanding. In purely reactive terms, the response limited further escalation.
However, the deeper reputational issue lay in the strategic thinking behind Halo itself. As Kate Hartley, co-founder of public affairs consultancy Polpeo, put it:“I'm still raging about this. What was Sky thinking? Halo was launched as the 'lil sis of Sky Sports' (sic), which immediately infantilises the channel and its audience.
“I understand Sky wants to draw more women viewers into sports. But the way to do this is not through stereotypes and patronising content ('How the matcha + hot girl walk combo hits' as the caption over a video of Erling Haaland sprinting towards goal sums it up). I can't believe they consulted any women in sport on this, who might just have said: 'I have an idea, why not use your power to champion women in sport instead of dumbing them down?'
“It was billed as a 'safe, positive space for women', which highlights the main Sky channels aren't safe or positive, presumably. This is the core problem here. Women don't need to be siphoned off to a pink, butterfly-covered TikTok channel to look for their sports news. We need better representation on the main sports channels. And if those channels don't provide a safe, positive space for women, then fix that problem.”
Hartley's critique captures why Halo failed so publicly and so quickly. The issue was not Sky's intention to engage female audiences, but the reductive assumptions underpinning that engagement. Halo misread its audience and inadvertently reinforced the very stereotypes the sports industry has spent decades trying to dismantle.
The episode also highlights a recurring communications pitfall: confusing inclusive with separate. As Sport England's This Girl Can marketing director Kate Dale argued in a Guardian letter responding to the controversy, representation matters because it shapes belonging. When marketing does not reflect the diversity of women's experiences, it risks alienating the very audiences it hopes to reach.
For communications leaders, Halo is a reminder that no amount of reactive agility can compensate for weak cultural insight upstream. Sky's rapid shutdown helped contain the crisis, but the reputational damage was largely self-inflicted. Listening after launch mattered, but listening before would have mattered more.- Maja Pawinska Sims
8. Cloudflare and AWS Outage Chaos
Cloudflare, which many of the world's websites and apps depend on to function, had a rocky end to 2025, suffering a series of global outages that left thousands of sites briefly unreachable.
The first occurred in November, when a software system failure took down the likes of X, ChatGPT, Uber, Spotify and OpenAI, along with countless other sites and services, for several hours. It was Cloudflare's widest spread outage in years.
Less than a month later, the web infrastructure provider suffered a second blow with another outage that took sites including LinkedIn and Zoom down with it, albeit for a shorter time.
And Cloudflare wasn't the only company to experience outages of this scale. Its problems came on the heels of a similar one that hit Amazon Web Services in October, which also disrupted thousands of businesses worldwide.
The ramifications are huge. Industry analysts say outages of this scale can translate into hundreds of millions of dollars in business losses across affected companies, as well as reputational damage caused by being unavailable, even for relatively short periods. In turn, the incidents highlight the risks facing businesses that are dependent on the likes of Cloudflare and AWS to keep operations up and running.
“From a technology perspective, the outage reminded us of the risks associated with a 'single point of failure,'” said Katie Huang Shin, Allison Worldwide's global president of technology.“With millions of customers around the world relying on Cloudflare and its services, the disruptions across supply chains, organizations and revenue streams were estimated at hundreds of millions to low billions of dollars - something no technology company can ignore in today's hyperconnected, cloud- and edge-oriented operating environment.”
To its credit, Cloudflare responded appropriately to the outage.“The company did not blame AWS or other partners for the outage. They took responsibility, and the 'we are sorry' posture was clear and present in its communication, including Cloudflare's leadership,” Shin said.“The transparent, leader-led acknowledgement, along with the company's post-mortem reflection on the incident, helped mitigate further damage to the brand and reputation. These days, audiences can deal with uncertainty, but they are less forgiving of silence.”
We may also have to accept that problems are part of our tech-driven world.“This is just part of the way the work looks now,” said one expert, adding that the consumers and businesses who rely on infrastructure providers may have been more forgiving of the outages than the media and policymakers.
“Breakdowns are part of technology life,” he said.“But companies need to show how serious they are about working to make them less frequent and, over time, will be better for doing so.”- Diana Marszalek
9. Cision Investigates as MyJobQuote's Expert Network Unravels
At the end of 2025, a sprawling network of apparently non-existent“experts”, complete with crude AI-generated headshots and unverifiable credentials, triggered one of the most uncomfortable credibility crises the PR and media industries have faced in years.
In December, Press Gazette revealed that more than 600 published articles across major UK news outlets featured advice attributed to a stable of home and garden experts supplied by MyJobQuote, a UK marketing platform for tradespeople. The experts – spanning interior design, gardening and construction – appeared prolific but oddly elusive: no LinkedIn profiles, no social media presence, and no evidence they could actually be hired.
One supposed expert, Fiona Jenkins, whose image was assessed as 99% likely to be AI-generated by detector Pangram, had been quoted more than 170 times in British media. In several cases, the same experts appeared repeatedly across titles owned by publishers including the BBC, Reach and News Corp.
As scrutiny mounted, publishers began quietly removing the affected stories, many now returning 404 errors. Reach was the only publisher to respond publicly, with chief content officer David Higgerson acknowledging:“The industry will need to work together to develop new ways to manage these growing threats.”
At the centre of the controversy sat Cision, the US-based PR services giant whose press release distribution platform hosted dozens of MyJobQuote releases and syndicated them into the media ecosystem, including Google News. Following the Press Gazette investigation and a growing industry backlash, Cision confirmed it was reviewing MyJobQuote's activity and compliance with its terms of service.
“Cision takes allegations of misleading or fabricated information seriously,” a company spokesperson said, noting that customers are prohibited from submitting false or intentionally misleading content. The company subsequently removed dozens of MyJobQuote releases from its platform, though at time of publication others remained live.
By contrast, MyJobQuote itself remained silent. Despite repeated attempts to seek clarification, none of the 15 named experts have come forward to verify their credentials or contest the reporting. The company's refusal to engage has only intensified suspicion and criticism.
The episode has already begun to change newsroom behaviour. Press Gazette reported that PR consultants were finding more journalists demanding proof of expertise, including LinkedIn profiles and education details, before agreeing to include comment. Others described retroactively questioning sources they had previously trusted.
For Richard Bagnall, co-founder of CommsClarity Consulting and a former leader of measurement and evaluation firms including Carma and Prime Research (acquired by Cision in 2017), the crisis exposes a systemic vulnerability.
“This situation highlights what happens when automation, SEO tactics and scaled distribution outpace verification,” Bagnall said.“'Expert comment' is being offered as a high-volume commodity, but trust is now its limiting factor. Once unverifiable sources circulate at scale, the damage goes well beyond one organisation. It undermines confidence in legitimate experts, forces publishers into cumbersome and expensive checks, increasing friction across the entire media ecosystem. The result is a growing trust deficit, not just in sources, but in content itself.”
Bagnall also warned that even the investigative tools used to identify fake content remain unreliable.“AI image and content detectors are renowned as being imperfect. Without care, we slide towards a world where neither content nor the mechanisms used to assess it can be trusted. In this environment, credibility has to be rigorously earned. It cannot be inferred from brand, scale, or technology.”
On Cision's handling of the issue, Bagnall noted that the company followed basic crisis-response principles: acknowledging the issue, referencing standards, launching a review and beginning to remove content. However, he argued the response leaned heavily on a“platform not publisher” defence.
“When your organisation operates at the centre of distribution, stakeholders expect stewardship and governance, not just scale,” he said.“That reassurance comes from visible, system-level guardrails, including strong verification of expert networks, early pattern detection and fast escalation.”
By contrast, he added, MyJobQuote's silence was“the worst possible response”.“In the absence of proof, accountability or explanation, trust collapses and stories escalate. This is exactly what has happened here.”
For both hacks and flacks, the lesson is unavoidable: in an AI-accelerated, low-trust environment, credibility can no longer be assumed but has to be proved.- Maja Pawinska Sims
10. Deloitte's AI Citation Errors Raise Questions About Trust and Quality Control
When a Deloitte report for the Australian government was found to contain apparent AI-generated errors, including fabricated references, it should have been a wake-up call for the firm. The fact that a similar problem then surfaced in a government-commissioned report in Canada made it look less like an isolated lapse and more like a deeper quality-control problem.
Deloitte's reputational fallout dates to October, when a Sydney university researcher alerted the media that the firm's 237-page report paid for by the Australian government was“full of fabricated references.” And the report, which the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations had on its website since the previous July, included more than just bad citations; a made-up quote from a federal court judgement and references to research that did not exist were in there as well.
To its credit, Deloitte Australia was upfront in responding to the high-profile blunder; the firm acknowledged the errors, declared them unacceptable, revised the report, and partially refunded the government.
It seems, though, that Deloitte's problems in Australia may have been part of a broader quality-control problem, as the firm came under fire in November for similar errors in a roughly C$1.6 million healthcare report commissioned by a Canadian provincial government.
But Deloitte Canada wasn't as effusive in its mea culpa as its Australian counterpart, saying in a statement that it“firmly stands behind the recommendations put forward in our report." and that“AI was not used to write the report; it was selectively used to support a small number of research citations. We are fully responsible for the quality of our work, including the accuracy of report citations.” And though Canadian pols seized the opportunity to slam Deloitte in the press, the fallout for the company was relatively tempered. In December, the federal government defended its C$1.1 million contract with Deloitte for advice on, of all things, deploying AI.
Critics agree that“there is no excuse” for these sorts of errors and, as one industry watcher said,“You can't blame any mistakes in your deliverables on AI.” That, however, doesn't mean they are unexpected, given the multitude of pressures on consultants to turnaround these kinds of reports.
“Was it the use of AI or the pressure to deliver quickly,” he said, likening the AI-generated errors to the kind of blunders junior employees could make.“Before AI, there were probably reports delivered with other mistakes in them, but they weren't headline news,” he said.
These incidents, however, are bigger than just Deloitte.“Artificial intelligence already has deep trust issues, and situations like this aren't helping,” said Josh Cobden, executive VP of Toronto-based Proof Strategies, noting that the firm's research shows 43% of Canadians feel content produced by AI is less trustworthy than other.
“Organizations that use AI, especially those that trade in the knowledge and ideas economy, would do well to adopt some of the same skepticism as many Canadians, and as the old saying goes, 'don't believe everything you read.' Artificial intelligence still needs humans,” he said.- Diana Marszalek
11. Coca-Cola Caught in the Crossfire of Rage-Bait Disinformation
The Oxford University Press made rage-bait its word of the year for 2025 and public relations professionals have already seen a number of crises this year that had their origins in the social media outrage machinery. The latest of these sought to drag Coca-Cola into the right-wing freak out over the NFL's selection of Puerto Rican rapper bad Bunny to perform at this year's Super Bowl.
As is often the case, the false claim that Coca-Cola would terminate its sponsorship of the Super bowl appears to have originated with an AI-written post at an anonymous fake news site in a story headlined“Coca-Cola vs. The NFL: Inside the Corporate Ultimatum That Could Redefine the Super Bowl Halftime Show.” The story q Quoted the companies CEO James Quincey who supposedly said,“I will end my sponsorship of the Super Bowl if they let Bad Bunny perform at halftime.”
But a Coca-Cola spokesman told fake news monitoring site NewsGuard,“This online rumor is fabricated and completely false... we don't sponsor the Super Bowl.” The story was also debunked by Snopes and a Yahoo fact check.
Nevertheless, the claim spread widely on Facebook and other social media sites and was delivered into millions of feeds by“engagement farming” tactics Taking advantage of algorithms that increasingly reward sensational disinformation. It seems likely that the false claim was seen by many people who were never exposed to the facts.
Save one corporate affairs executive,“we've seen a number of crises for companies like cracker barrel and American eagle driven by the online outrage machine. Even when the stories are transparently false, companies need to respond, and even then they can be dragged into divisive debates by those who would prefer the stories to be true.
“Companies need to constantly monitor what is being said and how these stories spread and need to have a process to decide when to intervene.”-Paul Holmes
12. IndiGo Naps At The Wheel
Last December, Indian airline IndiGo faced a significant operational crisis, leading to widespread flight cancellations that affected hundreds of thousands of passengers. The turmoil began when the airline was unable to meet new crew-rostering regulations aimed at improving pilot rest schedules, resulting in more than 1,000 cancellations in just one day. This sudden disruption left many passengers stranded, causing missed events such as weddings and funerals and raising concerns about the airline's reliability and customer service.
The predicament stemmed from IndiGo's failure to effectively plan for the implementation of new duty rules, which were announced nearly two years prior. While other airlines complied with the changes, IndiGo admitted it was not adequately prepared, stating that it lacked sufficient rested staff to operate its schedule. The airline's aggressive expansion strategy, which included launching new international routes, may have diverted attention from these critical operational adjustments, leading to severe mismanagement of its flight operations.
As a response to the crisis, IndiGo secured a temporary exemption from some new rules and committed to stabilising operations. However, the airline's reputation, once synonymous with reliable air travel in India, has come under threat, especially after competing airlines began to capitalise on IndiGo's misfortunes by offering additional flights to affected passengers.
“The IndiGo situation was a reminder of how quickly strain shows up when scale, people, and planning fall out of sync,” said Nitin Mantri, President of Asia-Pacific, We.“Regulatory changes were known, but the way they played out on the ground exposed gaps in readiness and human capacity.”
Mantri went on to say that the learning is straightforward.“Compliance cannot remain an exercise on paper. Organisations need to test plans against how work actually happens, well before changes take effect,” he said.
He added that it also demonstrated how trust is shaped during disruption.“Passengers felt the impact first, and stabilising operations was only part of the task. Rebuilding confidence required visible corrective action and clear, honest communication. From a communications and leadership standpoint, acknowledging impact early, reducing pressure where possible, and letting action lead the message are critical to effective crisis handling,” said Mantri. -Camillia Dass
13. Arc'teryx Makes Explosive Environmental Blunder
In September last year, outdoor brand Arc'teryx faced significant backlash after hosting a fireworks display in Tibet, which raised concerns about the environmental impacts. The outdoor brand organised the promotional event, called "Rising Dragon," featuring choreographed pyrotechnics along the Himalayan ridgelines. Despite claiming that the materials used were biodegradable and that measures were taken to relocate wildlife, the display drew criticism online for contradicting the company's environmentally conscious image.
Following the negative response, Arc'teryx and the event's artistic director, Cai Guo-Qiang, issued apologies stating that the display did not align with the brand's core values. They acknowledged that the public's criticism highlighted the need for a more careful evaluation of artistic expressions and their environmental implications. The company emphasized its commitment to respecting nature and promised to address the situation directly with Cai and the local team involved.
The incident also prompted an official investigation by local authorities in Shigatse, Tibet, and criticism from the China Advertising Association, which expressed disappointment over the brand's marketing approach. While a county official initially stated that the event complied with environmental standards and did not damage local ecology, the uproar from the public indicated a broader concern about environmental degradation and commercialization in a region sacred to Tibetan Buddhists.
"The underlying problem behind Arc'teryx's crisis is visible in the misalignment between its Weibo and Instagram apology messaging. The global-local messaging gap laid bare a deeper communications and cultural disconnect between the China marketing team and headquarters,” said Nicky Wang, CEO of China, We. Red Bridge.
“In a market that contributes a significant portion of Arc'teryx's global sales, the China team has likely been enjoying substantial autonomy and was simply eager to 'own' the winter moment and dominate share of voice - and the only playbook they reached for was to go big or go home with a stunt,” added Wang.“It is not hard to imagine that the approval process with HQ was light, with an emphasis on partnering with a renewed artist, and that the true nature and implications of the activation were not properly interrogated.”
Wang went on to say that at the moment, it appears their immediate sales have not been significantly affected; however, a repeat incident like this will certainly damage the brand reputation.“To avoid that, Arc'teryx's China brand team and global leadership must start talking more. More importantly, they must start talking in the same language about risk, culture and what the brand should and should not stand for," said Wang. -Camillia Dass
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