A score is a measurement, and measurements can be overtaken by events. A brand we rated highly can still halt withdrawals, disclose a breach, or be found insolvent. This page sets out — in advance — exactly what we do when that happens, so our response is a procedure we already committed to, not a decision we make under pressure.
Our score history is append-only. When a brand fails, we do not quietly remove its page, and we do not change a past number. The score is shown frozen — struck through, but still visible, with the value it held at the moment we froze it and a timestamp. The strike-through is the record: it shows what we published and when, rather than hiding it.
These are the targets we hold ourselves to. They are targets, not warranties — a genuinely novel situation may take longer, and we would rather be accurate slightly later than fast and wrong.
We do not make an unscheduled change to our methodology inside the review window, or while a related legal threat is live. Overfitting our method to the last failure is its own kind of error. A methodology release whose plan, scope, and date were recorded before the event proceeds on its own schedule, and we disclose it in the post-mortem rather than letting it look like a quiet reaction. “No change” is a legitimate, and often correct, outcome: some failure modes are outside what our published evidence can see, and our methodology says so.
For how a score is computed in the first place, see /methodology. Every published score and every change to it is recorded in our audit trail.