What happened
On Tuesday, an update we shipped exposed the email addresses of 41,000 people to other users of the same workspace. It was live for six hours and eleven minutes. We detected it, we fixed it, and we have notified every affected person.
That is the factual summary. Now let me do the part that press statements usually get wrong.
The four sentences that matter
A public apology has four sentences, and almost everyone writes them in the wrong order.
Sentence one: what happened, in plain words, with numbers. No passive voice. Not "an issue was identified". An update we wrote, on Tuesday, exposed 41,000 email addresses. Say it until it sounds bad, because it is bad.
Sentence two: who was affected. Not "some users". 41,000 named people, in eleven countries, and here is how to find out if you are one of them.
Sentence three: what we have already done. Fixed at this time. Notified at this time. And — this is the part companies skip — what we have done about the class of bug, not this instance. We did not ship a bad update. We shipped a bad update because our review process had no test for permission boundaries, and that gap is now closed, with a named owner and a date.
Sentence four: what happens next, with a date. Not "we are committed to learning from this." On the 14th, we publish the full technical post-mortem, including the parts that make us look incompetent.
What never to say
Never say "we apologise if anyone was inconvenienced". The word "if" converts an apology into a hypothetical.
Never say "this is not who we are". If it happened in your system, it is exactly who you are right now. Say what you are changing instead.
And never, ever put the apology in the third paragraph, after two paragraphs about how much you care about trust. If you care about trust, lead with the number.
Why this works
Trust is not rebuilt by sincerity. It is rebuilt by accuracy under pressure. Every time a company tells the truth about something that makes it look bad, it deposits a little credibility; every time it hedges, it withdraws a lot.
We made a serious mistake this week. We are going to describe it in enough detail that you can check our work. That is the entire strategy, and it is the only one that has ever worked.