Human decision-making is often guided by heuristics—cognitive shortcuts that can lead to systematic biases. Whether such heuristics influence the judgments of highly trained experts is a critical question for organizational performance. We investigate one of the most prominent, the availability heuristic, whereby a recent, salient adverse outcome can disproportionately influence subsequent decision-making in the context of U.S. kidney transplantation. We leverage the salience of negative news—the asynchronous arrival of information about an early graft failure—as a quasi-experimental "news shock," and test whether if it influences the subsequent decision making of kidney offer acceptance. Using national data on nearly four million kidney offers and a difference-in-differences design, we find that a recent graft failure causes a significant decline in a center's willingness to accept subsequent organs. This effect is short-lived, concentrated in clinically ambiguous cases, and amplified when decisions are made under greater cognitive load. Further analyses confirm this behavioral response is a suboptimal heuristic and rules out that it is a form of beneficial organizational learning. Our findings provide large-scale, causal evidence of an availability cascade in a high-stakes organizational setting and suggest that operational interventions designed to mitigate the impact of salient negative events could improve the efficiency of the organ allocation system.