Home Depot appropriately handled its data breach crisis through the company’s quick acting with an initial statement to the general public and through crisis management emails sent to its customers. In Home Depot’s initial statement spokeswoman Paula Drake reassured their customers that the company had been actively working with forensics and security teams since they had become aware of a potential breach (Li, 2014). According to W. Timothy Coombs, Ph.D. in his research paper Crisis Management and Communications, the general public wants to know how a crisis will directly affect them and they expect truthful accurate answers (Coombs, 2007). After Home Depot’s initial response, the company sent out a mass email making its customers aware of
