• WCBS TV goes live a little after 6:30 a.m. with a story reported to them by passersby watching dozens of rats running through in and around a KFC/Taco Bell restaurant. Rats on air described as, "Plump, healthy-looking and oh-so-agile."
• By 7:30 a.m. or so the Consumerist, read by thousands, posts it as "Massive Pound-And-A-Half Rats Infest KFC/Taco Bell In The West Village." Seventeen members decide to comment on it. (Who knows how many click the link back to the original TV news story…)
• By 12:30 p.m., MSNBC had this story running on the front page of their site and on their TV channel making it national news.
• By 12:45 p.m., MSNBC had updated the story: "Yum Brands Inc., based in Louisville, Ky., owns the Taco Bell and KFC restaurant chains. Its shares fell in trading on the New York Stock Exchange Friday.” Employees came to work at the Greenwich Village KFC/Taco Bell restaurant Friday, but no customers were allowed in as health inspectors arrived. There was no answer at the phone number displayed in neon on the store window below the words “We Deliver.”
• This also caused media outlets to rehash past Yum Brand health concerns.

The company later released a statement (about six hours too late for damage control) saying:
“This is completely unacceptable and is an absolute violation of our high standards. This restaurant has been closed and we are addressing the issue with the franchise owner. We will not allow this store to reopen until is it completely resanitized and given a clean bill of health.”

• By 1p.m. it's the top video story on CBSnews.com: “Rats Swarm KFC-Taco Bell In NY.”
  
• It's among the top stories on CNN Money.
  
• Also by 1p.m., FOX News has both a story and video under the headline, "We do Rodents Right."

If this company had media monitoring and crisis monitoring someone could have called to move media crews away from the front window or covered the front window where dozens of media outlets had set up shop filming and getting customer reaction shots. They weren't pleasant. Words like "sickened" and "disturbing" and "gross" all played out on national media with the KFC/Taco Bell logo right behind.

Seven hours is all it took...