High-visibility outages aren’t new. Sony, in particular, averages one per week. However, only some firms can emerge from them with their dignity– and customer base– intact. Here’s how:

• Tell the truth. From day one. All you need is one tech-savvy customer– or blogger monitoring the system– to call you out and the carefully crafter story goes down the tubes. It’s often humbling for a rich firm to admit “something broke and we’re working on it”, but trying to blame Anonymous, or China, only goes so far.
• Focus on partial solutions. Maybe your hack was vast and you can’t restore everything now. Give the customers what can be restored today and it can help keep rebellion and attrition down. Maybe you don’t need to bring back the online store today, but adding a page where they can check your warranty and products will at least make you look alive and credible. It’s worth an estimate of how long you can leave a customer without service before they can line up a replacement.
• Keep us in the know. Even if it’s just a daily ‘there is no news’ notification, it helps reassure customers that the system is under repair.
• Plan for the worst. Once more, it’s admitting sad truths, but it’s often times better to announce breaches and failures in terms of the worst possible scope. Saying ‘we only lost 2% of users’ today, then amending six times to 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, and 50 gets you the same net damage, but seven hits in the media, and the distrust from lying the first time.

Nobody wants to fail, but if you treat customers with the integrity they deserve, you can at least avoid looking sleazy or incompetent as you patch things together.