Thousands of travelers with Southwest Airlines reservations are stranded and unable to get where they are going (or to return home). While weather delays initially caused this problem, Southwest’s own inadequate systems made recovery slow and infuriating. It took many days for the company to finally position itself to make things right. Let’s take a…
Rogers Communications is the dominant internet provider in Toronto and the rest of Ontario. When it failed on Friday, it crashed a quarter of Canada’s internet connections, disrupting everything from mobile service to work-at-home to financial transactions and emergency 9-1-1 service for parts of three days. Now that service appears to be back, Rogers has…
Fastly runs a CDN — a content delivery network that makes delivery of Web pages faster globally. Due to a bug, major Fastly clients including Amazon, Reddit, Spotify, eBay, and Pinterest were unable to serve pages to customers for about an hour Tuesday. Fastly apologized — and its apology is a clinic in how to…
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is now the subject of multiple allegations of sexual harassment, including both suggestive speech and unwanted kissing. I’m not here to litigate Cuomo’s conduct. He’s agreed to have his attorney general investigate his conduct. As I have before for others, I’ll analyze his apology statement for its effectiveness in communication….
US Representative Ted Yoho had a heated verbal altercation with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) on the steps of the capital. According The Hill, he referred to her as a “fucking bitch.” Later, he apologized on the House floor. It was one of the worst apologies ever. AOC had made some controversial statements about why poor…
Greg Glassman was CEO of Crossfit, a fitness system that is affiliated with many gyms. He shared insane and racially insensitive conspiracy theories on a call with gym owners — and then the company issued a rambling and ineffective statement to justify itself. Glassman’s now out the door. The statement is practically a case study…
Last week, the Hallmark Channel pulled ads for the wedding planning site Zola that featured two brides kissing. Yesterday, it reversed itself. No matter what happened in this episode, Hallmark was going to be at the center of controversy and lose viewers. At that point, you might as well do what you think is right….
The Verge exposed the toxic culture at direct-to-consumer luggage startup Away. The CEO Steph Korey sort of apologized, then got replaced. The whole sordid saga illustrates how not to run a company. The Verge feature article by Zoe Schiffer was well reported and devastating. Away has dispensed with internal email — everything runs on Slack….
Peloton made a controversial holiday ad. Then it dug a deeper hole with a non-apology that blamed people for being offended. Here’s the ad. What do you think? What’s the problem here? For one, the woman is hella skinny even at the start of the ad. The implication is that her husband thinks she needs…