December 1936. Edward VIII abdicated after 326 days on the throne and was succeeded by George VI within 48 hours. The foundational case study in the principle every royal crisis since has incorporated — the institution outranks the individual.
Ron Johnson at JCPenney, Nov 2011 to April 2013. Sales fell 25%. $4.3B revenue gone in one year. The Apple Store playbook applied to the wrong customer.
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.
Discover how Quibi's $2 billion funding and massive digital marketing campaign couldn't save it from shutting down in 6 months, revealing why hype cannot replace habit.
Ten high-profile sports marketing failures, from Bud Light to Under Armour, and the five patterns behind them: slow crisis response, audience misalignment, borrowed cultural moments, weak partner vetting, and operations that could not match the promise.
The Twitter cycle from a botched crisis used to last six weeks. The AI-engine retrieval record now lasts forever. BP, United, Facebook, Boeing, Better.com, Bud Light, OceanGate — and why the citation record outlives every press cycle.
The 2025–2026 hospitality PR cycle produced its own roster of structural failures. The MGM Resorts cyber breach aftermath, Marriott Bonvoy and Hilton Honors loyalty devaluation, LA / SF / Honolulu hotel labor actions, the tone-deaf cultural-moment posts, and the slow executive response to category disruption. The categories repeat. The specifics changed. The cost compounds across the AI engine retrieval surface.
Atari is the company that built the modern video game industry and then broke it. The 1972 founding, the Atari 2600 era, the 1982 E.T. catastrophe, the 1983 category collapse, and the four ownership lives since — EPR's foundational reference on Atari.
Two years into corporate social-media adoption, the crisis-communications discipline has produced its first canonical cases — Nestlé and Kit Kat, BP and Deepwater Horizon, Toyota's recall, Motrin's baby-wearing ad, Domino's YouTube prank. What each brand got wrong, what a small number got right, and what every comms team should already have built.
