2025 in crisis PR: The year everything became “real time”, again
If 2024 felt like a dress rehearsal for permanent instability, 2025 was the year the chaos stopped being theoretical.
Not because the world suddenly got worse overnight, but because three things collided at speed:
Geopolitics became consumer facing (tariffs, war, sanctions, supply chains, travel disruption, energy prices, online polarisation).
Platform dynamics got harsher (lower trust, more synthetic content, less moderation certainty, faster pile-ons).
AI moved from novelty to infrastructure (not always working well, but already shaping news, reputation, search, and evidence). (Reuters)
And reputationally, that means one thing: crises increasingly arrive already “decided”, with screenshots, stitched clips, fake statements, and instant moral framing, long before facts, context, or legal clarity has had a chance to breathe.
This is a long, month-by-month look back at 2025 through a crisis and culture lens, then what it suggests for 2026.
The big picture: what cut through in the UK this year
A genuinely useful barometer (for anyone working in comms) is not “what trended”, but what ordinary people repeatedly said they’d heard about.
YouGov’s year-end analysis of weekly “top story” recall in Britain is revealing: the peaks were dominated by a UK Budget moment, major geopolitical flashpoints, Trump’s return, LA wildfires, tariffs, and several high-profile UK incidents and resignations. (YouGov)
That matters because it mirrors the real PR problem of 2025: audiences were not living in one shared news cycle, but they were repeatedly yanked back into a handful of mega-stories that coloured trust, anger, spending, travel, and online behaviour.
January 2025: Fire, fear, and a reminder that infrastructure is fragile
Los Angeles wildfires became one of the first true “global attention” crises of the year, with Reuters reporting deaths, mass evacuations, and widespread destruction early in January. (Reuters)
Later analysis suggested the impact went beyond the immediate death toll, with Reuters covering research on excess deaths linked to the aftermath. (Reuters)
In the US, New Year began with the aftershock of the January 1 Bourbon Street truck attack in New Orleans, which carried into the year as a public safety, policing, and trauma story. (AP News)
PR takeaway: weather and security crises now come with an expectation of instant leadership presence, instant resource visibility, and instant empathy. But audiences are also sharper than ever at spotting performative “we care” content. The first week of the year set the tone: credibility is operational, not poetic.
February 2025: Diplomacy as live entertainment, and AI as politics
Late February delivered one of the year’s most surreal “press conference theatre” moments: Reuters described a White House meeting between Trump and Zelensky that ended in an extraordinary public clash, widely read as a turning point in the tone of US support and the wider war narrative. (Reuters)
At the same time, the year’s AI narrative accelerated from “tools” to “statecraft”, including the Paris AI summit coverage by Reuters, with leaders and CEOs framing competitiveness and regulation as economic destiny. (Reuters)
PR takeaway: 2025 made it almost impossible to separate reputation from geopolitics. Brands discovered, again, that “we don’t do politics” is not a strategy, it’s a hope, and hope is not particularly robust.
March 2025: Trust issues, system glitches, and “digital life” fatigue
In the UK, Reuters reported on the sheer volume of banking IT failure incidents, a story that fed into a wider mood: life is digitised, but not reliably so. (Reuters)
This was also the period where media and comms conversations increasingly centred on AI’s impact on information ecosystems, including Reuters Institute work tracking trust, audience behaviour, and the emerging role of AI interfaces in news discovery. (Reuters Institute)
PR takeaway: people have become less shocked by technical failure, but more angry about the consequences (lost access, lost money, lost time). The reputational risk is not the outage, it’s the feeling of helplessness.
April 2025: Tariffs, cyberattacks, and the death of a global figure
April was stacked.
Reuters reported Trump unveiling sweeping reciprocal tariffs, a policy story that quickly becomes a reputational story for any company exposed to price rises, supply chain disruption, or nationalist backlash. (Reuters)
In the UK, Reuters covered a major Marks & Spencer cyberattack and the business damage of a slow recovery, while also reporting subsequent calls for tighter disclosure expectations around significant attacks. (Reuters)
Separately, Reuters reported Co-op dealing with hacking attempts in the same period, reinforcing the sense of a broader retail threat landscape. (Reuters)
In the US, Reuters reported a major security breach affecting the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), another reminder that “trusted institutions” are just organisations with inboxes and vulnerabilities. (Reuters)
And globally, Reuters reported the death of Pope Francis in April, a story with cultural weight far beyond politics. (Reuters)
PR takeaway: April captured the modern crisis mix perfectly: policy shocks, cyber reality, institutional fragility, and symbolic global events, all at once. In that environment, tone-deafness is less forgivable than ever, because people are already overloaded.
May 2025: Crowds, public risk, and the crisis of “offline harm”
In Britain, Reuters reported a car ploughing into crowds during a Liverpool title parade, hospitalising many. (Reuters)
Later Reuters coverage detailed the legal outcomes and scale of harm, underscoring how long these stories live after the initial headlines. (Reuters)
PR takeaway: organisations, councils, venues, and event partners are now judged on prevention, not just response. Crowd safety is reputational. So is the quality of your coordination with emergency services, and how quickly you correct misinformation when panic spreads online.
June 2025: War-risk escalation, and billionaire feuds as market events
June was a reminder that geopolitical escalation can happen fast: Reuters reported US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites and the global reaction, with clear warnings about escalation risk. (Reuters)
And in a very different category of “crisis”, Reuters covered the public Trump-Musk feud, including the market impact and the way political conflict can instantly become shareholder drama. (Reuters)
PR takeaway: 2025 blurred the line between “serious” crises and “culture” crises, because both can move markets, reshape trust, and trigger real-world risk. A CEO’s online behaviour can now sit uncomfortably close to national politics.
July 2025: Cyber as normal, and the reputational cost of saying too little
By mid-year, cyber incidents felt less like shocking anomalies and more like a standing operational threat.
Reuters’ reporting on the M&S incident, and the suggestion that major attacks may go unreported elsewhere, fed into a growing expectation: if you are breached, people assume it, if you deny it, they assume you are lying. (Reuters)
PR takeaway: disclosure is no longer just legal compliance, it is credibility management. The question is not “should we share”, it’s “what can we share that reduces speculation without compromising security or liability”.
August 2025: Peace talks as content, and the cruelty of certainty
Reuters reported on proposed high-level diplomacy around Ukraine, including talks involving Trump and Putin, and the pressure and controversy around territorial concessions. (Reuters)
PR takeaway: peace efforts now happen under the harsh lighting of online certainty. Everyone has an instant verdict, and most verdicts are delivered with a confidence that reality rarely deserves. That spills into domestic culture, workplace conflict, brand activism, and celebrity scandals too.
September 2025: UK political scandal, and the permanence of “character narratives”
Reuters reported UK Deputy PM Angela Rayner’s resignation over a tax error, and the political reshuffle fallout. (Reuters)
PR takeaway: modern scandals harden into identity stories, fast. Not “a mistake”, but “what this proves about them”. Recovery depends on whether you can break that narrative loop, which is harder than issuing an apology.
October 2025: Gaza ceasefire developments, terrorism, and the impossible moderation problem
Reuters reported a Gaza ceasefire agreement and its next phases, alongside broader diplomatic framing. (Reuters)
In the UK, Reuters reported a deadly Manchester synagogue attack and the security response, later followed by related terrorism charges. (Reuters)
PR takeaway: this is where “cancel culture” as a phrase starts to feel too small. What we are actually dealing with is radicalised certainty, and the way platforms distribute it. That affects politics, but it also affects private individuals who get mistakenly identified, misquoted, or targeted.
November 2025: Platforms, AI discovery, and the quieter collapse of publisher control
By late 2025, a key shift was no longer “what’s trending on TikTok”, but where people are getting answers at all.
The Reuters Institute tracked the growing role of AI platforms and chatbots in how people encounter news, alongside continued trust challenges. (Reuters Institute)
Meanwhile, Pew-linked reporting highlighted how usage patterns splinter by age and politics, which explains why “everyone is furious” can be true online and irrelevant offline, depending on the audience you actually have. (The Verge)
PR takeaway: brand reputation is now shaped by a messy trio: search, social, and AI summaries. You are not just fighting headlines, you are fighting the compressed version of the headline that gets repeated as “context”.
December 2025: Antisemitic violence, platform liability, and the late-year cyber drumbeat
Reuters reported the Bondi Beach attack in Australia as a terrorist investigation amid wider antisemitic threats, alongside memorial and political fallout. (Reuters)
In Britain, Reuters reported convictions in a plot targeting the Jewish community, reinforcing the sense of a wider threat environment. (Reuters)
At the same time, December brought more evidence that cyber risk remains constant. Reuters coverage highlighted regulatory pressure and cross-border scrutiny in tech, including Meta and WhatsApp terms being challenged by Italy’s antitrust authority. (Reuters)
And in the background, 2025 ended with a quietly important business reality check: Reuters reported that many executives still believe in generative AI’s future impact, but are adjusting expectations about speed, cost, and delivery. (Reuters)
PR takeaway: 2025 ended where it began, with institutions trying to keep pace with threats that are both digital and physical, while the public grows more cynical about performance and more demanding about action.
So what actually happened to “cancel culture” in 2025?
The simplistic version is: it eased off.
The real version is: it evolved.
1) Cancellation became more procedural
Less “viral outrage only”, more complaints, regulators, lawsuits, platform enforcement, employer policies, and commercial consequences. Cyber disclosure expectations, platform regulation, and antitrust scrutiny all fed this broader “accountability by structure” trend. (Reuters)
2) Audiences got better at spotting manipulation
Not necessarily kinder, but more sceptical. People have lived through too many:
clipped videos
context-free screenshots
“statement” graphics that turn out to be fake
AI-generated imagery and text that looks plausible enough to share
That scepticism is the beginning of the fightback, but it is not a moral awakening, it is pattern recognition.
3) The outrage economy became less central, but more extreme
Broad attention is harder to hold, which means the people who remain deeply engaged are often the most intense. That is why reputational crises feel simultaneously louder and less connected to everyday life, a split the Reuters Institute has been tracking via trust and news consumption behaviour. (Reuters Institute)
What 2025 taught us about crisis PR, in practice
Speed matters, but sequencing matters more
The winning pattern in 2025 was not “fastest response”, it was:
Stabilise reality (what happened, who is affected, what is changing right now).
Remove uncertainty where you can (timelines, receipts, independent verification).
Only then do values and tone land properly.
If you reverse it (values first, facts later), you get branded as evasive, even when you are trying to be careful.
“Saying nothing” now fills itself in
In 2025, silence became a canvas. People paint it with whatever they already believe.
That is why minimal holding statements became more important, even when you cannot speak fully. The job is often not persuasion, it is containing invented detail.
The centre of gravity moved from press to platforms, and now to AI summaries
A crisis is no longer just:
the article,
then the tweets,
then the apology.
It is also:
the Reddit thread,
the TikTok stitch,
the auto-generated Google preview,
the AI assistant answer,
and the “someone said” version that becomes social truth.
Celebrity culture didn’t slow down, it absorbed crisis logic
While politics, war, and corporate failures dominated headlines in 2025, celebrity culture didn’t disappear into the background. Instead, it adopted the same mechanics as crisis news.
What used to be light entertainment now behaves like reputational infrastructure.
This year’s biggest celebrity moments were not just watched, they were interpreted, litigated, politicised, and archived.
Katy Perry’s space flight wasn’t just a novelty, it became a debate about wealth, environmental hypocrisy, and performative progress. Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl performance wasn’t simply praised, it was dissected as a cultural statement within hours. Sydney Sweeney’s jeans campaign didn’t just sell denim, it triggered arguments about the male gaze, feminism, and brand responsibility. Even something as trivial as the Coldplay kiss cam moment evolved into a brand activation case study in real time.
Meanwhile, romance narratives like Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement were consumed less as private milestones and more as public mythology, reinforcing how little separation now exists between personal life and public brand.
At the same time, music and fashion moments such as Beyoncé’s Grammy win, Charli XCX’s wedding, and Giorgio Armani’s final show were framed not just as achievements, but as cultural closing chapters, symbols of transition, legacy, and generational shift.
These moments travelled through the same systems as political crises:
clipped and repackaged
stripped of context
filtered through ideology
judged instantly
By the time facts or intent became clear, opinion had already settled.
This matters because it shows how crisis logic has fully merged with celebrity culture. Outrage, backlash, defence, and conspiracy are no longer reserved for scandal. They are default responses to visibility.
Even death is no longer an endpoint.
The online reaction to high profile deaths this year demonstrated how quickly grief collapses into speculation, theory building, and moral positioning. In several cases, including the continued global discourse surrounding Charlie Kirk’s death, the story did not resolve. It multiplied. Official accounts competed with alternative narratives, some of which remain active months later, detached entirely from evidence.
From a crisis perspective, this marks a fundamental shift. Celebrity culture no longer provides escapism from instability. It mirrors it.
2026: What to expect next, based on 2025’s trajectory
1) More cyber-driven reputation crises
Not just breaches, but disruption, supplier compromise, stolen customer data, and ransom-driven leaks. The UK retail attacks and the broader cyber reporting pattern suggest this is not easing up. (Reuters)
2) More geopolitical “splash damage” for normal brands
Tariffs, sanctions, travel risk, conflict flare-ups, and activist pressure will keep colliding. This year’s tariff regime changes and Iran escalation are the template. (Reuters)
3) AI misinformation gets more boring, which is the real danger
The scary phase is not the obvious deepfake, it’s the mundane, plausible, constant drift of slightly wrong summaries that get repeated as fact. Reuters’ reporting on businesses tempering GenAI expectations is likely to coexist with wider public exposure through everyday products. (Reuters)
4) The fightback continues, but it is selective
The backlash against performative outrage will keep growing, but it will not apply evenly. Some industries, identities, and controversies will remain high-voltage. The “fightback” is not a new kindness, it is a new fatigue.
A final, unglamorous conclusion
2025 was not just a year of big events, it was a year where people increasingly treated the internet as both courtroom and coping mechanism.
In that environment, the most effective crisis PR did three things consistently:
It respected reality, including the boring operational bits.
It respected the audience, meaning it didn’t insult their intelligence with shiny phrasing.
It respected time, meaning it understood that reputations now live inside search results, AI summaries, and repeated screenshots, not just headlines.
If 2026 brings more instability (and it probably will), the advantage goes to organisations and individuals who stop treating crisis response as a statement-writing exercise, and start treating it as what it is now: reputation engineering under pressure.