Human factors
Designed for the worst twenty minutes of your year
Most tools in this category are designed for the day you evaluate them — a calm Tuesday, a demo, a feature comparison. This one is designed for the twenty minutes you will actually use it, when you are not at your best.
Stress is a design constraint
Acute stress measurably narrows attention, degrades working memory, and pushes people toward hasty irreversible actions. It is why aviation runs checklists and why theatre has a surgical time-out — not because pilots and surgeons are careless, but because everybody is worse under load. An emergency-access tool that ignores this is optimising for the wrong twenty minutes.
What that changes
It tells you that you are allowed to be here
Break-glass access is psychologically loaded. Reaching for it can feel like admitting failure, or like tripping an audit that gets held against you later. That hesitation costs real minutes at the worst possible time.
So the screen says the quiet part out loud, at the moment of use: this is what break-glass is for, it is logged because that is the point, and it is not a black mark against you.
It answers “will I make it worse?” with facts
Starting a playbook run contacts nobody, and the steps that reach real people are labelled — so you can read ahead without fear of waking the company.
When you stop a run, the confirmation tells you what survives: the steps you completed, when, and any messages sent. Fear of destroying the record is what makes people leave a run they should stop.
At 3am on a phone, it tells you whether you are alone
Two questions come before all others when a page wakes you: am I the single point of failure, and is anyone else on this? If an escalation rule is attached, not responding is not a catastrophe — it moves to the next person, and the alert says so. It also shows how many others have already responded.
Both lines appear only when they are true. A comforting inaccuracy told to someone deciding whether they can go back to sleep is the worst kind there is.
It writes the timeline so you do not have to
The other half of incident anxiety arrives afterwards: reconstructing what happened, from memory, for a document people will read.
Every step, timestamp and message is already recorded, so the write-up is a review rather than a reconstruction. One button copies it out in order — including the steps you did not reach, usually the most scrutinised part of any review. Available from the start of a run, because knowing it is handled is worth more during the incident than after it.
The best moment to be calm is before the incident
Nothing here beats having done it before. Rehearsal is what actually makes a crisis survivable, which is why Glassbreak ships practice runs and guided tabletop exercises rather than treating drills as an afterthought. A break-glass path nobody has ever walked is a hypothesis, not a plan.
What we deliberately did not build
No breathing exercises. No encouragement. Under acute stress people need fewer words and fewer choices, not motivation — and a security tool that starts behaving like a wellness app forfeits the credibility it needs at exactly the moment it matters. The reassurance in Glassbreak is made of facts about your system, or it is not there at all.
Why nobody else says this
Every product in this space sells capability: more integrations, more alerting, more escalation paths. Capability is necessary and it is not sufficient, because the constraint at 3am is rarely the tool's feature list — it is the person using it. We would rather be the one that is easiest to use badly-rested, frightened, and in a hurry.