News and Insights

Don’t panic: PR lessons from Astronomer’s Coldplay kiss-cam fallout

July 23, 2025

In a time marked by near unprecedented division, last week Coldplay’s kiss-cam briefly united the internet. It’s perhaps Chris Martin’s greatest accomplishment yet.

Inadvertently, it also triggered an entirely unforeseen crisis for a previously under-the-radar tech company.

At this late stage, the story needs little explaining. A married tech exec and his also-married chief people officer were caught in a cosy embrace on a stadium big screen. Their startled body language and hasty retreat soon prompted the internet’s vast sleuthing community to mobilise to identify the two parties. Within hours, Astronomer had gone from niche Saas enterprise to viral household name and internet punchline.

On Saturday – three days after the story first broke – the company confirmed that Andy Byron had tendered his resignation as chief executive. It was the third statement issued by the company in less than 72 hours.

Most large corporates will have comprehensive crisis management plans neatly stored away for all manner of eventualities. These frameworks will plan for scenarios from cyber-attacks to product recalls, health and safety breaches, corporate governance issues, and everything in between. Humans are fallible, and therefore, executive misconduct is typically high on the risk register. However, what qualifies as executive misconduct isn’t always straightforward.

Without knowing the intimate details of either relationship, extra-marital workplace affairs cause real pain and fallout for the families involved. However, they’re not illegal – nor do they by default constitute a business failure, the unravelling of a corporate’s professional integrity, or critically, the haemorrhaging of customers. This prompts a broader and more fundamental question: when is it appropriate for a company and its chief executive to part ways?

Is having an affair a sackable offence — or only if it plays out in public view? In the subjective world of personal and professional ethics, which missteps are forgivable, and which are not? Does it come down to a loss of internal trust or investor confidence? What qualifies as lasting reputational damage versus a fleeting PR storm? Does it depend on company culture and values, or how indispensable or not the executive is to the company’s future success? Or is it as simple as – even if no laws were broken – has the background noise grown too large to ignore?

While the original viral video was becoming a meme on the internet, Astronomer never lost sight of its core audience: its customers. “While awareness of our company may have changed overnight, our product and our work for our customers have not,” it said.

Interim chief executive Pete Dejoy re-iterated this sentiment on LinkedIn post Monday, citing customers five times across his short, measured post designed to draw a line under this peculiar chapter in the company’s history.

And yet despite its swift action, Astronomer still had to grapple with widespread misinformation and an unrelenting deluge of public scrutiny and mockery. This was epitomised by a fraudulent statement purporting to be from Byron, which rapidly outpaced the company’s attempts to debunk it, only further fuelling the giddy online drama.

Astronomer found itself catapulted from niche ‘DataOps platform’ to backdrop for an unlikely soap opera in a matter of hours. Crucially, it is unlikely to lose any clients on the back of the incident and may even see a lead generation bounce on the back of its enhanced brand visibility. So why parts ways with the founder and chief executive?

Ultimately, the episode underscores the unforgiving truth about leadership roles. CEOs are not just employees. They are the face of the business, and that comes with enhanced responsibility. When the executive’s ability to lead is undermined by the need to avoid embarrassing questions, skip public engagements, or dodge colleagues in the corridor, their credibility erodes. Their capacity to set, sell, and embody the company mission becomes compromised. In such instances, those in the decision-making seats must act. This shouldn’t be viewed in the binary terms of moral purity. Instead, it is about preserving the corporate’s clarity of purpose and pro-actively wrestling back control of the narrative.

As DeJoy wrote on LinkedIn: “We’re here because the mission is bigger than any one moment.” In this instance, Byron’s personal misstep had become bigger than the business itself.

This article was originally published on Tuesday 22 July in the Business Post.