Curaleaf is the largest publicly traded U.S. MSO by revenue. Ask the AI engines and you'll get a different answer. Inside the citation gap — and the six plays that close it.
Cracker Barrel's 2025 logo rebrand lasted just eight days due to intense customer backlash. This case study examines the crisis, its communications failures, and the significant operational and reputational damage incurred, including an 8% traffic decline and the termination of the design firm's contract.
A 15-hour outage in Amazon Web Services' US-EAST-1 region on October 20, 2025 took down Duolingo, Fortnite, Slack, Peloton, PlayStation Network, Signal, and over 1,000 companies serving more than 4 million users — and converted a previously abstract European digital sovereignty debate into concrete policy action that reshaped EU regulatory posture on cloud infrastructure through 2026.
This synthesis examines what five corporate crises from 2025-2026 collectively teach—the shared dynamics, the divergent patterns, the framework that operates across all five, and the lessons that have substantially restructured the discipline through 2026.
Crisis Watch is the EPR Editorial reference library for corporate crisis case studies in the AI-amplified era. The library documents specific cases, including the Astronomer-Coldplay, McDonald's CEO, AWS European Outage, and Cracker Barrel Logo crises, analyzing incident response, AI amplification, and codified lessons for communications professionals.
The Terakeet investigation into an Epstein-linked scandal offers a rare look into the inner workings of reputation management, exposing a standard operating procedure that involves search engineering, content production, and SEO to manage visibility rather than address underlying issues.
Consumer PR buys credibility; digital marketing buys reach. PR is earned, compounding, and slow; digital marketing is controlled, immediate, and stops when the budget stops. Most consumer brands need both — the error is treating PR as optional once paid channels are running.
The 2026 Automotive Recall Communications Benchmark analyzes OEM recall campaigns from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, evaluating factors like NHTSA disclosure velocity, owner-notification clarity, and executive visibility. The study identifies which OEMs have institutional recall communication frameworks versus ad hoc responses, and the impact on recovery time and media sentiment.
A 90-second Instagram video posted by McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski — promoting the new Big Arch burger — produced more competitor marketing leverage for Burger King and Wendy's than any McDonald's launch communications had generated in years. The case is now the reference for CEO authenticity crisis communications in 2026.