There's another situation I've seen happen where there's clearly a problem with a third party's component, and customers are looking to you to fix it, but the t

There's another situation I've seen happen where there's clearly a problem with a third party's component, and customers are looking to you to fix it, but the third party is genuinely not to blame for the problem and it would be unfair to expose them to the negative PR which would result. In my case this was with a component on a car which caused what looked to the customer to be a worrying defect (so the negative PR would have been significant), but was in fact completely harmless, and it only ever manifested in a fairly narrow range of meteorological conditions. All you can really do then is hunker down and work together to fix the problem. There's nothing to be gained by alienating the only people who can fix something which is, at the end of the day, making you look bad.