Andrew Moesel
Executive Vice President, U.S. Lead, Issues and Crisis
July 27, 2025
A kiss can be innocent. A kiss cam, decidedly less so—especially when it involves a CEO and head of HR, both married to other people, caught in what might charitably be called an “unguarded moment” at a Coldplay concert.
By now, if you’re not familiar with the Astronomer situation, I’d genuinely like to know the GPS coordinates of the rock you’ve been living under. I’m even a little late to the party here, as the company has already tried to spin this incident with a new marketing campaign. But as a crisis practitioner, I felt like a I needed to add my two cents (and trust me, there’s been enough hot takes to fuel a small reactor) because I believe there’s a real lesson here in the brutal mathematics of modern crisis response.
The 24-Hour Eternity
Here’s what is fascinating about this whole debacle: Astronomer took what, in pre-internet terms, would be considered a perfectly reasonable 24 hours to craft their response. Twenty-four hours! In corporate time, that’s practically light-speed deliberation. Think about everything that had to happen: confirm it was actually their CEO (because deep fakes are a thing now), assess legal obligations, convene emergency board meetings, draft language that wouldn’t make lawyers weep.
But in internet time? Twenty-four hours is geological. It’s enough time for misinformation to not just spread, but to crystallize into accepted truth. Someone posted a fake CEO apology that was so believable—and frankly, so well-written compared to most corporate mea culpas—that it became the narrative. Others invented details about company employees being present, manufacturing workplace culture concerns from whole cloth.
The company lost control of their own story before they even knew they needed to tell one.
The Paradox of Modern Crisis Communication
This is the maddening catch-22 of contemporary crisis management: you need to respond before you have complete information, but you also can’t communicate ahead of facts. It’s like being asked to solve a calculus problem while the teacher is still giving the lesson.
The old crisis communication playbook—the one that served us well for decades—assumed you’d have time to gather facts, consult stakeholders, and craft measured responses. That playbook is now about as useful as a rotary phone for creating an Instagram post.
What Companies Can Learn
So how do you navigate this impossible equation? A few hard-won insights:
- Speed recognition is everything. Not every corporate hiccup needs immediate response, but viral moments with reputational stakes do. The skill is pattern recognition—knowing when something is about to explode before the explosion happens.
- Acknowledgment buys you time. You don’t need to have all the answers immediately, but showing awareness of the situation establishes you as the authoritative voice rather than letting others define the narrative. “We’re aware of the situation and looking into it” isn’t poetry, but it’s a stake in the ground.
- Prepare for the unpreparable. Yes, it’s awkward to have “executive malfeasance” templates sitting in your crisis folder. Imagine that conversation: “Hi, Mr. CEO, could you review this statement for when you might hypothetically embarrass us all on live television?” There are delicate ways to accomplish this task, and those uncomfortable conversations now will save you a lot of angst later.
- Accept the incompleteness. Modern crisis response means communicating while the story is still being written. It’s uncomfortable, it’s imperfect, but it’s often essential. It doesn’t mean speculating or getting ahead of the facts; but it does mean stating what you know, when you know it (even if not much), as the situation continues to unfold.
The deeper truth here is that we’re all operating in a world where crisis is around every corner: private moments can become public instantaneously, satire can become mistaken for reality, and any unplanned moment or remark can unravel months of careful reputation management. The companies that thrive in this environment aren’t the ones that never face crises—they’re the ones that move at the speed of controversy rather than the speed of committee meetings.
