Samsung is back in the headlines yet again today after they announced that they would be stopping the production of the Galaxy Note 7. The tech giant’s PR nightmare has gone from bad to worse since it first began back in August, when customers first started to experience problems with the smartphones overheating.

Visibrain looked into how social media reacted to some of the worst moments of the crisis.

Southern Rail found themselves in the middle of yet another social media firestorm on Monday with the launch of #SouthernBackOnTrack. In an attempt to use outside pressure to put an end to ongoing strikes, the campaign encouraged commuters to tell the RMT Union how they felt about the disruptions on Twitter.

The #TrainGate hashtag took over Twitter on Tuesday, after Virgin Trains released CCTV footage that suggested Jeremy Corbyn actually had a seat on the train he had previously declared was so full that he had been forced to sit on the floor.

In an unusual PR move, the brand hit back at the Labour leader after he attacked the shortcomings of the UK’s privatized rail service earlier this month.

So was it a good move for the brand or not? Visibrain looked into the #TrainGate crisis to try and determine what the general public and the media had to say about the scandal, and Virgin’s attempt to defend its reputation.

Southern Rail is in the hot seat on Twitter today, after unions announced that its staff would be going on a 5-day strike. The movement is an effort to improve overall security, by ensuring that trains have both a driver and a conductor. As the longest rail strike in the UK since 1968, the walkout has massively reduced the number of trains running, causing chaos for commuters.

Angry customers have flocked to Twitter to complain about the disruptions. Visibrain analysed today’s conversations around Southern Rail to find out what people had to say, and what the widespread anger could mean for the company.

This article was updated on August 2nd

It has been a difficult week for Byron Burger. The restaurant chain has been dividing social media ever since it was discovered that it had turned dozens of members of staff over to immigration officials. Byron allegedly set up a fake training session to lure workers into a government raid that resulted in over 35 of them being deported.

Yesterday was the second edition of Amazon Prime Day. Amazon renewed its efforts to dethrone Black Friday as the biggest online shopping event of the year. But after the issues the brand experienced last year - and with many shoppers reporting additional problems this year - did Amazon manage to dodge another #PrimeDayFail debacle? We used Visibrain to analyse online activity on social media, blogs and in the press, to find out how things went for Prime Day 2016.

The Panama Papers scandal has been in full swing for over a month now and is showing no signs of stopping. Quite the contrary: the database went online this week and is fully searchable, allowing the public to uncover more and more of the individuals involved every day.

We used Visibrain to look back on the first moments of the biggest leak in the history of data journalism, to see how the scandal broke and spread in the press and on social media.

The Panama Papers scandal has now been raging since April, and online activity around the topic has been gradually decreasing. That all changed this weekend when “John Doe”, the anonymous individual at the source of the Panama Papers, spoke up for the first time, publishing a written account of his thoughts and intentions. On top of that, the Panama Papers database went public last night, stimulating the conversation around the topic even further. We used the Visibrain media monitoring platform to see how these latest developments have boosted the conversation around Panama Papers.

British Home Stores has been hitting the headlines this week after it declared on Monday that it would be going into administration.

The iconic department store chain’s predicament has put thousands of jobs on the line and revealed some very unethical business practices by the company’s shareholders. We used the Visibrain media monitoring platform to study what’s being said about the brands situation online.

David Cameron has had another particularly difficult week on Twitter. The UK PM came under heavy fire last week after the Panama Papers scandal revealed that his family benefitted from offshore tax evasion.

The Prime Minister has been the target of a huge backlash on Twitter as a result, with a number of dedicated hashtags being used to call for his resignation, organize protests, and generally ridicule the PM’s predicament. We used the Visibrain Quicktrends feature to analyze the various hashtags that appeared around David Cameron over the past week.

UPDATE: Our full, in-depth study of the Panama Papers is now available for download.

The #PanamaPapers scandal has been taking over our newsfeeds this week. Dubbed the biggest leak in the history of data journalism, the crisis has put the financial affairs of the world’s most rich and powerful under scrutiny.

Panama Papers has been raging since Sunday, and for those involved it certainly looks like things are going to get worse before they get better. We used the Visibrain media monitoring platform to take a look at some of the key data showing the online impact of the crisis so far.

On Wednesday morning, Microsoft introduced Tay, an experimental online chatbot designed to converse with humans and learn from their responses.

The internet being what it is, it didn’t take long for things to go horribly wrong. Within a matter of hours, trolls had the bot spouting outrageously racist and inappropriate comments, much to the amusement of the online community. Microsoft was eventually forced to shut Tay down and delete her offensive tweets, claiming she needed some “adjustments”. We used Visibrain to find out what people had to say.

Missguided is on our crisis radar this week after having experienced some embarrassing technical difficulties. The fashion brand’s website crashed catastrophically on Monday during a one-day-only sale, leaving many unable to make purchases.

Fans were understandably furious, and we used the Visibrain media monitoring platform to take a look at how the crisis unfurled and how the brand handled the situation.

Last weekend was “Clean for the Queen”, Keep Britain Tidy’s three-day initiative to clear up litter across the country. The campaign encouraged local communities to clean up the streets in preparation for the Queen’s 90th birthday celebrations in June. Unsurprisingly, many were distinctly unimpressed by the message, which has been called “patronizing” and “cringeworthy”.

Time for this month’s crisis round up! Twitter gave a fair few brands a hard time in February, so we looked back on the month’s top social media disasters.

This weekend, American restaurant chain Red Lobster was presented with the kind of publicity opportunity that marketers dream of. Just before her halftime performance at the Super Bowl, pop superstar Beyoncé released her new single Formation, whose lyrics mention Red Lobster restaurants. Fans waited expectantly for the brand to respond to the mention on Twitter…and waited, and waited.

It took Red Lobster a full eight hours to respond to the 275,963 tweets generated by the endorsement, and Twitter was not impressed. We used Visibrain to find out what users had to say and to show why timing is so crucial in social media, especially where Twitter is concerned.

Microsoft’s partnership with the NFL (National Football League) has been a pretty rough road so far, and Sunday’s AFC championship game between the New England Patriots and Denver Broncos didn’t help. The Patriots were using Microsoft Surface tablets to monitor the match…only to have them stop working at a crucial moment in the game.

It turned out that the glitch wasn’t actually Microsoft’s fault, but that didn’t stop Twitter from having a field day. We used the Visibrain Twitter monitoring platform to analyze the 21,942 tweets that were posted during and after the game, to find out how Microsoft handled the crisis.

It’s no secret that provocative advertising is on the rise, and for good reason: an edgy ad can mean the difference between obscurity and success. However, the strategy is a risky one, as UK restaurant chain Gourmet Burger Kitchen found out the hard way this week. The brand took a gamble on an ad campaign that poked fun at vegetarians, and thousands of people took to Twitter to protest.

So how did they get things so wrong, and was it all worth it? We used the Visibrain Twitter monitoring platform to try and find out.

2016 may have only just begun, but a good number of brands have already found themselves in hot water on Twitter. We took a look at some of those that found themselves under fire last week.

IBM was in the hot seat this week after #HackAHairDryer, their campaign to encourage more women to get involved in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) backfired on social media.

In what The Verge called one of the worst PR efforts in recent memory, IBM encouraged women to post ideas about how they would hack the humble hair dryer. It was all over in barely 48 hours: the backlash on Twitter resulted in the campaign being pulled completely and IBM posting an apology. Using the Visibrain Twitter monitoring platform, we looked back at the 18,581 tweets posted between December 7th and December 8th to see what happened on Twitter and how IBM handled the crisis.

The Visibrain blog regularly publishes case studies about brand crisis situations on social media, and November has left us spoilt for choice. It’s no secret that Twitter is pretty merciless with companies who slip up: it’s the preferred medium for spreading information at record speed, true or not.

Here are our top five cases of brands that were hot topics on Twitter last month for all the wrong reasons.

Earlier this week, theme park Sea World announced that it planned to put an end to its controversial orca displays in San Diego. The attraction’s reputation has been stuck in a downward spiral for years following the release of the incredibly damaging documentary “Blackfish” in 2013, seeing its profits and attendance rates plummet.

“Sea World” was a worldwide trending topic on Twitter this Tuesday morning as a result of the company’s latest attempt to salvage its poor image. But how did users react, and will it be enough to save the company’s reputation? We used the Visibrain Twitter monitoring platform to try to find out.

Last week, UK telecoms service Talk Talk announced that it had been the victim of “a significant and sustained cyberattack”. In the third hacking incident that the company has suffered this year, sensitive information belonging to thousands of customers was stolen, including phone numbers and bank account details.

Talk Talk has understandably come under some heavy fire in the media, and has been very present on Twitter from the beginning of the crisis. We used the Visibrain platform to break down how the crisis unfurled on Twitter, how Talk Talk reacted as a company, and what tweeters had to say about the cybersecurity disaster.

Volkswagen has gotten itself into some very serious trouble over the past two weeks, after it was discovered that millions of its cars were fitted with software designed to cheat emissions tests. The German manufacturer, previously known for its economical and low-emission cars, is going through the worst crisis in its history.

Of course, the world’s tweeters had plenty to say about Volkswagen’s fall from grace. Using the Visibrain Twitter monitoring platform, we analyzed the 2,040,834 tweets posted between September 18th and September 28th to determine how the crisis unfurled on Twitter.

This weekend should have been the start of “Operation Fortitude”, in Melbourne, Australia. The controversial policing operation would have allowed Australian Border Force officers, in collaboration with other agencies, to carry out random visa checks in Melbourne’s CBD.

The public uproar was immediate and overwhelming, with many calling the operation “Orwellian”, “racist” and “intrusive”. Within a matter of hours, the negative backlash had grown to such an extent that the whole thing was cancelled.

Unilever found itself at the center of a Twitter storm this month, after a crisis broke on social media concerning the brand’s activities in India. To draw attention to the wide-spread mercury pollution and poisoning left behind by a Unilever thermometer factory in the province of Kodaikanal, Indian rapper Sofia Ashraf released “Kodaikanal Won’t”, a music video based on rap star Nicki Minaj’s hit song “Anaconda”.

It has not been a good month for Jeremy Hunt. The UK Health Secretary had NHS medical staff in uproar after making insensitive comments about their work ethic. In a speech about NHS reforms aiming to provide better seven-day care for patients, Hunt caused an outcry with his remarks about there being a “Monday to Friday culture” in some parts of the NHS.

Amazon launched the first Amazon Prime Day last week, a global shopping event that promised deals to rival Black Friday. Things didn’t go quite as planned however, as Amazon received harsh criticism on Twitter from customers who were far from impressed with some of the deals available.

Donald Trump may be very wealthy, but he certainly isn’t popular. So when the real estate mogul announced his intention to run for the 2016 American presidential elections, he was never going to have an easy time of it. The Republican candidate sent Twitter into a frenzy after making racist remarks about Mexican immigrants at his presidential announcement.

Uber is having a tough time at the moment. The private transport service has a history of causing tensions with the taxi industry, but things escalated to a whole new level last week. In France, taxi drivers took to the streets in protest of Uber Pop, Uber’s cheapest service yet, calling for it to be banned. News of the violent demonstrations quickly went international and were trending several times last week on Twitter.

Using the Visibrain Twitter monitoring platform, we can find out how Twitter contributed to the news going viral, and how Uber responded to the brand crisis.