What is The Golden Hour in a Crisis?

People died because Optus didn’t know its emergency call system had failed.

On 18 September 2025, a routine firewall upgrade knocked out triple-zero calls across SA, WA, NT and parts of NSW. The outage ran for about 14 hours. Optus had no effective alarms and didn’t understand what was happening. Five customers rang Optus’s own call centre to report they couldn’t reach 000. Nobody escalated.

Two deaths were subsequently linked to failed Triple Zero calls.

That is what a missed Golden Hour costs.

The Golden Hour is the window immediately after an organisation learns of a serious problem. Three things need to happen at once: establish and verify the facts, brief the people who will speak for the organisation, and inform the people who need to know before they read it elsewhere.

That is not a 150-page crisis manual. It is a checklist short enough for the leadership team to reference in two minutes. Fact-check first. List the stakeholders and communicate with each of them. Be honest about the pressure your spokesperson can sustain and your board’s unity. Remember empathy. An apology delivered with compassion in the first hour is worth more than a perfect statement delivered in the second news cycle.

Speed alone is not the point. An organisation that responds fast with the wrong message has created a second problem. What matters is visible, honest engagement. Silence is interpreted as indifference, or concealment, or both.

Optus chose silence. CEO Stephen Rue told a Senate inquiry he was “deeply sorry.” He then revealed that Optus executives held eleven internal meetings before informing the regulator ACMA, the Communications Minister, or the public that people had died. Nearly a full day of meetings and talking points while families were being told their relatives were gone.

That delay became the second crisis.

The old line is right: never waste a crisis. It’s an opportunity.

On 2 May 2025, a truck operated by NJ Ashton, a transport company, lost about 750 kilograms of scrap metal shards across about 30 kilometres of the M1 Pacific Motorway north of Sydney. The debris shredded the tyres of over 300 vehicles. Twenty kilometres of Australia’s busiest highway was closed for about nine hours.

NJ Ashton’s response was immediate, personal, and courageous. General manager Daniel Falconer went on radio within minutes, apologised without qualification, and took full responsibility. No fact-checking delay was needed: the facts were littered over the road. What mattered was who spoke, how fast, and whether the message carried empathy or legalese. Falconer chose empathy. The company sent every qualified mechanic it had to the highway to help drivers and emergency crews get vehicles moving. It liaised with the insurance company. More than a thousand motorists came forward reporting damage in the days that followed

Then it did something no crisis communications textbook would have predicted. A week after the spill, NJ Ashton hosted a free community barbecue on the Central Coast, the impacted region north of Sydney. Falconer and staff were there to meet the people whose mornings they’d ruined.

That is crisis communications at its best. Not a statement drafted by lawyers. A leader with an instinct to face the people affected rather than manage them from a distance.

None of this works from instinct alone. A battle is often won or lost before it is ever fought. Organisations that move well in The Golden Hour have done the unglamorous work beforehand. They’ve identified likely risks, tested response protocols, and know who briefs whom before a crisis begins.

Trust = Truth + Transparency + Traceability.

The evidence trail an organisation leaves can now be checked against its record. So, that discipline needs to exist before The Golden Hour, not be assembled during it.

Update, October 2026: the Golden Hour is the first stretch of a longer sequence. The 5 steps of crisis management set out the whole order.