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Social Media
PR Crisis: Under Armour
In today’s world of technology, it feels as if nobody’s personal information is safe, even in a smartphone application. Recently, Under Armour’s MyFitnessPal app has made this state- ment true. MyFitnessPal, an application designed for tracking exercise and dieting habits, was affected by a very dangerous data breach by an unidenti ed source. According to an article by The Verge, the source hacked usernames, emails, and hashed passwords of up to 150 million accounts. The breach occurred back in late February. But, the company said that it wasn’t made aware of such breach until March 25th. Because of this incident, ac- cording to an article in Fortune Magazine, Under Armour’s stock dropped as much as 4.6 percent following the announcement of the data breach. The company emailed all users of the app, giving general details of the data breach. The company then required all users to change their passwords for security reasons.
In general, the public relations actions followed the company’s discovery of the data breach. According to an article by Public Relations News Online, Under Armour released an email to their users on March 29th with details describing what happened during the data breach and suggested actions for the users. The company also released a press release
on the company website, which basically had the same information that was sent to those that received emails from the company. Yes, I do believe that Under Armour did the right thing by alerting their customers of the data breach and making it mandatory for everyone to change their passwords. They did a good job of also alerting the public about the situa- North Carolina Central University Career Services & Outreach
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