Striking While the Iron’s Hot

On July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike issued a defective update, causing a global outage impacting Microsoft Windows systems that was widely reported as one of the largest IT blackouts in history. The Aircover team jumped on the news, recognizing the opportunity for PagerDuty, a leader in digital operations management, to insert itself into the conversation as experts in the space.

Time was of the essence more than ever that morning, as people around the world awoke to the news. We quickly began executing on a fast-paced PR strategy with two immediate media pushes: sharing the company’s official statement from PagerDuty CTO Tim Armandpour with national business, tech and trade media, and offering CEO Jennifer Tejada to discuss the situation with select media.

Despite the crowded landscape, we broke through the noise, and secured interviews on CNBC’s Overtime with Jon Fortt and Bloomberg Tech’s Caroline Hyde, about the implications of the outage and how companies can be more resilient moving forward.

Striking while the iron was hot, Tejada shared a strong POV (e.g., “PagerDuty knows that it’s not a matter of if there will be another major security incident, but when”), along with recent survey results. Client-agency teamwork and key media relationships were also key ingredients for success, garnering earned coverage for weeks following the outage.