Agent Crisis Comms

Agent crisis communications

Under pressure, communication goes wrong in predictable ways: too slow, too vague, or committing to a cause before it is known. Agents can compress the assembly and drafting time dramatically while a human keeps the judgement and the voice.

Team

• Fact assembler (agent-incident-response-team): establishes what is known, unknown, and confirmed as of a timestamp.
• Drafter (incident-status-update): produces the holding statement and channel variants.
• Claims checker: removes anything not yet supported, especially cause and timeline.

Shape: a fast loop repeating as facts change, gated on a human every cycle.

Method

1. Separate known, unknown, and unconfirmed explicitly. Nearly every damaging crisis statement is an unconfirmed item stated as fact.
2. Publish a holding statement early. Acknowledging the issue, impact, and next update time beats silence, and silence is read as either incompetence or concealment.
3. Never state cause before it is established. Speculation that turns out wrong costs more trust than the original incident (see agent-postmortem-council).
4. Commit only to the next update time. Timelines for resolution given under pressure are usually wrong and become the story.
5. Keep every channel consistent. Status page, email, social, and support macros must say the same thing, since discrepancies read as evasion.
6. Re-run the loop as facts change. Each update is a fresh pass through assembly, drafting, and checking rather than an edit of the last one.
7. Write the follow-up honestly once resolved. What happened, what was affected, what changes, without minimising language.

Run it

In Claude Code, run the assembler over incident data into a facts file with confidence marked per item, then the drafter, then the claims checker, producing a statement a human approves before any channel is touched. Repeat per update. Port to LangGraph as a cycle with a human approval interrupt on every iteration.

Signals it works

• Statements distinguish confirmed facts from unknowns explicitly.
• Every update names when the next one comes, and it arrives.
• Cause appears only after it is established.

Boundaries

Agents assemble and draft; a human speaks and owns every word published. Never let an agent post directly. Incidents involving personal data, safety, or regulated services carry notification obligations with legal deadlines and need counsel immediately (see pii-handling). Apologies and liability statements have legal consequences.