In PwC’s 2019 Global Crisis Survey, 69% of business leaders said their organization had faced at least one corporate crisis in the previous five years. The average among them was three. And 95% of the leaders surveyed expected to face a crisis in the future. Crisis, in other words, is not a rare event for a company. It is a scheduling question.
The crisis communication statistics below come from research firms, consultancies and industry surveys published over the past several years. Each section groups the numbers by what they tell you to do, because a statistic is only useful if it changes a decision. Where a figure comes from a press release or secondary coverage rather than a full report, we say so, so you can judge the weight it deserves.
How Often Crises Actually Hit
Start with frequency. The PwC 2019 survey covered more than 2,000 leaders across industries and countries. Beyond the 69% headline, it found that the companies that came out of a crisis in better shape than they went in were the ones that had invested in preparedness and response capability before the crisis hit. That finding gets less attention than the frequency number, but it is the more useful one.
PwC’s later Global Crisis and Resilience Survey, published in 2023, found that 96% of organizations had experienced some form of disruption in the prior two years. Disruption is a broader category than crisis, covering everything from supply chain breakdowns to cyber incidents, but many disruptions become communication problems the moment customers, employees or reporters notice them.
What this means for you: if your company is more than a few years old and has never had a crisis, the odds suggest you are due, not lucky. Treat a crisis plan the way you treat insurance. You buy it before you need it, and you review it every year.
Most Crises Are Self-Inflicted
The Institute for Crisis Management, which has tracked news coverage of business crises for more than three decades and released its 36th annual report recently, has a consistent finding. Mismanagement is the leading cause of the crises it tracks. Not natural disasters, not activist attacks, not random accidents. Decisions made inside the company.
ICM also separates crises into two types: sudden ones, such as an explosion or a data breach discovered overnight, and smoldering ones, which begin as small internal problems and grow until they go public. Its research has repeatedly found that smoldering crises make up the majority. A safety complaint that sat unanswered, a pattern of employee grievances, a product defect the engineering team flagged months earlier. These are the stories that end up on the front page.
What this means for you: the best crisis communication starts before anything is public. Build a route for internal warnings to reach someone who can act on them. Most companies that end up in the news over misconduct had people inside who knew. The communication failure happened weeks before the press called.
Speed Expectations Have Collapsed
A consumer survey reported in 2025 found that 64% of consumers expect brands to respond publicly on social media during a crisis, and 84% said the speed of the response matters. The specific numbers vary between surveys, but the direction never does. People expect brands to say something fast, on the channel where the problem showed up.
Social media has also overtaken traditional channels as the primary place brands respond to a crisis, according to coverage of recent social media industry research. That shift changes who is in the room. A crisis response that used to be drafted by legal and communications over a day now needs a social team that can post an accurate holding statement within an hour.
What this means for you: decide in advance who is allowed to post a first statement and what it says. A holding statement does not need answers. It needs to show that you know, you care, and you will share more by a specific time. The worst first response is silence, and the second worst is a confident claim you have to walk back.
Trust Starts Lower Than You Think
The Edelman Trust Barometer for 2025 found that 61% of people globally reported a moderate or high sense of grievance, a belief that business and government serve narrow interests and that people like them are worse off. That is the audience your crisis statement lands in. Many readers start from suspicion, not neutrality.
Reputation is also worth a lot to the companies that lose it. In Weber Shandwick’s 2020 research on corporate reputation, executives attributed an average of 63% of their company’s market value to its overall reputation. Even if that figure overstates it, the point holds. A crisis that damages trust does not just cost a news cycle. It can cost a share of the company’s value that took years to build.
What this means for you: write crisis statements for a skeptical reader. Skip the language of corporate reassurance, such as “we take this very seriously” and “the safety of our customers is our top priority,” because skeptical readers treat those lines as evidence that you have nothing real to say. Lead with facts, actions and dates.
The Preparedness Gap
If crises are this common, you might expect most companies to be ready. They are not. A May 2025 industry release, headlined “Think Crisis Planning Is Optional? 70% of Businesses Make that Mistake,” reported that seven in ten businesses lacked a formal approach to crisis planning. Treat that number with some care, since it comes from a vendor’s release rather than a peer-reviewed study, but it lines up with what independent researchers see.
Forrester has published research finding that B2B companies in particular lack adequate crisis communications preparedness. B2B leaders often assume crises are a consumer brand problem. Then a data breach, a product failure at a major customer, or an executive scandal lands, and the company finds it has no approved spokesperson, no media list and no process for briefing customers before they read about it.
A plan that lives in a shared drive and has never been tested is closer to no plan than most teams admit. Contact lists go stale, spokespeople leave, and approval chains that looked clean on paper fall apart when the general counsel is on a flight.
A working plan does not need to be long. It needs a short list of likely scenarios for your business, a named decision maker for each, a pre-approved holding statement, a current contact list for employees, customers, partners and key reporters, and a clear rule for who can speak publicly. Most of the value is in deciding these things before the pressure arrives, when people can still think clearly.
What this means for you: the gap between companies that have a plan and companies that have rehearsed one is larger than the gap between having a plan and not. Run a tabletop exercise at least once a year. Pick a realistic scenario, set a timer, and see how long it takes to get an approved first statement out.
Employees Are Now the First Audience
The Edelman Trust Barometer has found for several years running that “my employer” is among the most trusted institutions in people’s lives, trusted by roughly three in four respondents and well ahead of media, government or business in general. That trust cuts both ways in a crisis. Employees are the audience most likely to believe what leadership says, and also the audience most likely to feel betrayed if they learn the news from a reporter or a social post first.
Employees are also, more and more, the source of the story. Smoldering crises often surface because someone inside posts about them, talks to a reporter, or shares a screenshot of an internal message. A response plan that treats staff as an afterthought, to be updated after the press statement goes out, ignores the people most likely to shape the story.
The practical shift is sequencing. Brief employees before or at the same time as the public statement, never after. Give managers a short version of the facts they can repeat, and tell them what they should not say. Open a channel for questions and answer the hard ones in writing. When people inside the company feel informed and respected, they tend to defend it. When they feel managed, the next leak is already being drafted.
This also applies to former employees, who now make up a large share of the voices reporters quote in crisis coverage. A company with a reputation for treating departing staff well has fewer people waiting for a chance to tell their side.
The 3-Clock Model
Every number above points to the same problem. In a crisis, three clocks start at once, and they run at different speeds. We call this the 3-Clock Model, and it is a useful way to structure any crisis plan.
The social clock is the fastest. It measures how long until the issue is trending among your customers, employees or industry. Today that is often minutes. The newsroom clock is next. It measures how long until a reporter calls and how long until a story publishes, usually hours. The legal clock is the slowest. It measures how long until counsel is comfortable with a full statement, which can take days.
Most crisis failures happen because a company lets the slowest clock set the pace for all three. Legal review is necessary, but it cannot be the only gate. A good plan pre-approves a holding statement template that legal has already signed off on, so the social clock gets an answer in the first hour. It assigns a spokesperson who can speak to reporters on the newsroom clock with approved facts. The full statement follows on the legal clock, but by then you have already shown up.
Picture how the clocks play out. A customer posts a video at 9 a.m. showing a product failure. By 9:40 it has thousands of shares. A trade reporter emails at 10:15 asking for comment by noon. Legal wants to review test results before saying anything, which will take two days. A company running on the legal clock says nothing until Thursday, and the story is written without it. A company running all three posts a holding statement by 10, briefs the reporter with confirmed facts by noon, and publishes its full findings when legal clears them. Same facts, very different headlines.
The short version of all this data: crises are common, mostly self-made, fast-moving and judged by a skeptical public, and most companies are not ready. Fix the internal warning system, pre-approve your first statement, rehearse once a year, and run all three clocks at once.