TL;DR: Had a small fire in the shop I work at and told a friend. Boss's wife had a panic attack when I told her during an unrelated thing. Boss isn't happy, but hasn't talked to me yet as of posting.
So I work at an autoshop and we had a very small, very short fire on a customer vehicle (and no fault has been given to us or to the vehicle itself, won't go into the details of the fire other than that) an unspecified number of days/weeks ago. The day of the incident, I told a friend I'd have to cancel an appointment we had because I smelled like smoke and only elaborated to them what I've mentioned above. She said nothing of it and didn't care (tho disappointed because we had this trip planned for a month before the incident).
Fast forward to today and I briefly mentioned that I texted and told a friend about the fire when determining exactly what day an employee was or wasn't at the shop, and I knew he was there the day of the fire, so I said “let me check my texts” which then the boss' wife (who works for us, it's a small shop) started having a panic attack about the business and it's reputation etc. Before I could explain anything she leaves and calls the owner, her husband, who was out on a roadcall at the moment. He walked in the shop and said, “We need to talk.” I asked, “Is this about [his wife]?” and he responded, “Yes,” before going into back of the shop where they were towing in the roadcall vehicle.
We haven't spoken since, but the owner's wife in her rant before leaving mentioned workplace confidentiality and it's gotten me worried about legal repercussions now for (what seems to me) such a simple thing of whom my friend didn't even care. In fact, they're considering being their own vehicle in to us here soon to be worked on, showing that they don't care that we had a small fire and that it hasn't effected our reputation to them. As for my friend telling others, I highly doubt it because they were a mechanic themselves and understand shit happens.
Even regardless of my reasons for telling my friend. We had three customers in the front of the shop when the fire happened and of course they knew because the shop owner hinself told them about it and that the outside of their vehicles may have a smell of smoke for a day or two. Even if he hadn't, the fire alarm did go off and could be heard throughout the building and so obviously customers' would be having questions. I believe that makes this a publicly known incident at least by a few people and obviously there'd be nothing legally holding them back from telling others (they are good customers tho, so we doubt they worried to much anyways, didn't seem to mind much either as no smoke entered the front and the fire only lasted 15 seconds tops. Fire department never came out or anything, it was a small fire that had a lot of smoke, took a few minutes to fully clear out).
Anyways, the boss hasn't talked to me yet today and I didn't know if anyone had suggestions on whay to say or anything I should know about regarding Workplace Confidentiality when it comes to matters within the company which are known already to the public. I always assumed myself that it refered to the information of customers and obviously not sharing or disclosing that information to non-employees.
Edit: added TLDR and fixing grammar.