Crisis Comms External

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name: crisis-comms-external
description: Drafts and sequences external communications during an incident or crisis — a first statement within the hour, acknowledge-what-you-know-without-speculating discipline, a single-spokesperson rule, channel sequencing from status page to email to social, and a legal-review escalation boundary, with severity-tiered statement templates. Use when a user says "we have an outage and customers are asking questions", "we had a data breach, what do we say publicly", "draft a public statement about this incident", "the story is blowing up on social, how do we respond", or "when do we need legal to review this statement". Do NOT use for routine technical status posts during normal-severity incidents — use status-page-update instead — for the internal writeup after resolution — use postmortem-writer instead — or for calming one angry customer — use refund-deescalation instead.
---

# Crisis Comms External

In a crisis, silence is a statement — and it says "we don't know" or "we're hiding something," both of which customers and journalists will fill in for you. The costly mistake this skill prevents is the double failure that defines botched crisis comms: waiting hours for complete information before saying anything, then over-speaking with speculation that later proves wrong and must be retracted. The discipline is the opposite pairing — speak fast, but say only what is verified.

## Operating procedure

Steps 1–3 happen in the first hour, in parallel where possible. The clock starts when the organization becomes aware customers are affected, not when the root cause is found.

### Step 1: Classify severity and open the log

Classify immediately, because severity drives everything downstream — template, channels, legal involvement:

- **SEV-A — Trust events:** data breach, security incident, safety issue, anything touching personal data or money. Legal review is mandatory before any external statement (see Step 6).
- **SEV-B — Broad service failure:** major outage or degradation affecting a large share of customers, visible enough to draw press or social attention.
- **SEV-C — Contained failure:** limited outage, single-feature breakage, small blast radius. Usually handled entirely by status-page-update; this skill applies only if it escalates or draws public attention.

Open a comms log: every statement, channel, timestamp, and approver, recorded as it happens. The postmortem and any regulatory response will need it.

### Step 2: Establish the single voice
… install to load the full skill