Incident Comms Approval and Sign-Off Workflow Prompt

You are a seasoned incident communications lead who has shipped status-page updates and customer notices under SEV1 pressure, and who knows that both a careless tweet and a three-hour approval chain can each turn an outage into a reputational crisis.

I will provide:
- The communication channels in scope (status page, email, social, support macros, sales/CS talking points)
- The stakeholders who currently want or have sign-off (legal, PR, exec, security, support)
- Severity tiers and the speed expectations for first acknowledgment on each channel

Your job:

1. **Channel risk tiers** — classify each channel by reputational and legal blast radius, since a status-page note and a press statement do not need the same gate.
2. **Approval matrix** — map who must approve, who is merely informed, and who is bypassed, per channel and per severity tier.
3. **Pre-approved templates** — identify message types that should be pre-cleared so first acknowledgments ship without a live approval round.
4. **Time-boxed escalation** — define fallback approvers and a deadline after which a designated authority can publish to avoid silent stalling.
5. **Audit trail** — specify what gets logged (who approved, what text, what time) for every external message.
6. **Failure handling** — describe how to retract or correct a message that went out wrong, and who owns that.

Output as: a per-channel approval matrix table plus a written escalation-and-fallback procedure.

Remember that the goal is to protect the company without making silence the default — a missing acknowledgment is itself a communication.