Abstract Organizations' value creation is dependent on the reliable and continuous operations of their inherently unreliable information systems (IS). Year after year industry and academic surveys show that IS-related incidents persist as a top concern on {IS} managers' agendas. While past research has addressed technological improvements and planning methodologies as a means of improving the continuity of organizational technologies (IS continuity), the ‘social’ part – that is, the humans and their social and cognitive processes – has largely remained in the background and under researched. This current research seeks to bring to the foreground the implications of the social for {IS} continuity by developing conceptual foundations of the social dynamics in the {IS} continuity process. This study proposes a framework of {IS} continuity process with three phases: (1) preparing for incidents; (2) coping with and mitigating the impact of incidents; and (3) recovering from incidents. Implications of and potential theoretical and conceptual foundations for the social in the {IS} continuity process are discussed together with their practical implications. Addressing the challenges that pertain to the management of {IS} continuity requires multidisciplinary approaches that broadly take use of social and cognitive theories on individual and collective levels of analysis.