Cast by joanwestenberg.eth
Show the cast this replies toA few other unforced errors in the comms stack: ⚬ Two timelines: Saying you spotted it Oct 21, then later saying Oct 20 without explaining the gap (letting HN/X assume the worst). ⚬ Anchoring: Calling 100,000 workspaces "a subset of users." ⚬ The email: Sending a breach notice at 22:37 UTC that literally cut off mid-sentence. 6/10
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Why does this happen to good engineering teams? Because during an incident, a hundred people pile into the Slack channel and nobody owns the comms response. Legal wants to say nothing. Engineering wants to explain everything. Meanwhile, an outsider's theory is upvoted to the top of Hacker News while the team rewrites a Google Doc again and again (and again) 7/10
Distributed security is brutally hard. Customers will forgive a permissions bug or a sophisticated attacker. What permanently updates their trust weights is information latency: what you told them during the crisis, and the exact timestamp of when you told them. 8/10
If you run a platform that holds other people's secrets, put this in place before your bad week: ⚬ Pick one person to own the words (separate from eng). ⚬ Tell customers within an hour of telling vendors. ⚬ Give scope as a ceiling ("up to 1.85%"), never "a subset." ⚬ Warn customers before vendor revocation emails hit their inbox. 9/10
