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From breakthrough products and inspiring leadership to marketing disasters and strategic own goals, a panel of business leaders choose the winners and losers from the last 12 months in business. Evan Davis hosts The Bottom Line’s unofficial annual awards, where the only prizes are the praise or pillory of the judges.

Guests:
Nicola Hodson, Deputy President, techUK
Peter Bazalgette, former Chair, ITV
Edwina Dunn, Co-founder, dunnhumby

Production team:
Presenter: Evan Davis
Producers: Sally Abrahams and Nick Holland
Sound engineers: Dave O’Neill and Tim Heffer
Production Co-ordinator: Katie Morrison

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday that Midwest Poultry Services is voluntarily recalling nearly 1.6 million dozen eggs produced in Texas after environmental testing raised concerns the products could be contaminated with Salmonella Enteritidis, a bacterium that can cause serious foodborne illness.

The recall covers 1,589,577 dozen white shell eggs and brown cage-free shell eggs, sold under multiple retail brands including Kroger, Simple Truth, Brookshire’s, Country Morning and Sunups, across six states in the South and Southwest.

How the contamination was discovered

Midwest Poultry Services said the potential contamination was identified through proactive environmental monitoring and a subsequent root cause analysis at two of its Texas farms. The company has since halted shipments of fresh eggs originating from those specific facilities, though it emphasized that no other Midwest Poultry Services products are affected by the recall.

As of the announcement, no illnesses had been reported in connection with the recalled eggs, according to both the company and the FDA.

Where the recalled eggs were sold

The affected eggs were produced between June 6 and July 3, 2026, and carry sell-by or best-by dates ranging from July 20 through Aug. 17, 2026. They were distributed to foodservice and retail customers across Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, and were specifically available at Kroger stores in Texas and Louisiana, as well as Brookshire Grocery stores across a wider footprint spanning Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Mississippi. The eggs were also sold through a number of smaller regional retail outlets.

How to identify recalled cartons

Consumers can identify affected cartons by checking for a specific identifying code printed in date-coding ink on the left or right side of the carton. Only cartons bearing the code P-1950 or 0840962, combined with a Julian Date falling between 157 and 184, are subject to the recall. Midwest Poultry Services has urged anyone who purchased eggs matching those codes not to consume them, and instead to discard the product or return it to the store of purchase for a full refund.

What Salmonella Enteritidis can cause

Salmonella Enteritidis is a bacterium capable of living on both the exterior and interior of eggs, and can cause a foodborne illness known as salmonellosis when contaminated eggs are eaten raw or undercooked. According to health officials, symptoms typically include cramps, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, chills, fever and, in some cases, headache, generally appearing within 12 to 72 hours after exposure. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has noted separately that salmonella infections can sometimes cause bloody diarrhea, with symptoms developing anywhere from six hours to six days after exposure.

Midwest Poultry Services said the infection poses a heightened risk to certain groups, including young children, elderly individuals and people with weakened immune systems, for whom the illness can occasionally become more serious. In rare instances, the company noted, the infection can spread into the bloodstream, resulting in more severe medical complications.

Response from retailers and the company

Midwest Poultry Services and Kroger did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside of regular business hours following the recall announcement, according to Reuters, while Brookshire Grocery could not be immediately reached. Consumers with questions about the recall have been directed to contact Midwest Poultry Services directly for further information.

A notable disclosure discrepancy

Coverage of the recall from different outlets has varied slightly in describing which states received the affected eggs at the retail level. The FDA’s own statement specified that the recalled eggs were available at Kroger locations in Texas and Louisiana, and Brookshire Grocery stores in states including Oklahoma, Arkansas and Mississippi, while the company’s own recall notice detailed a broader six-state distribution footprint for Brookshire Grocery specifically, spanning Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Mississippi. Consumers in any of those states who purchased shell eggs from the listed retailers are encouraged to check their cartons against the identifying codes regardless of which specific state-by-state breakdown they encounter.

Part of a broader pattern of recent recalls

This week’s recall adds to a string of food safety alerts issued in recent weeks, including a separate recall of an allergy medication over cross-contamination concerns and a recall of children’s organic fruit puree pouches due to a packaging defect. Egg-specific recalls tied to Salmonella contamination have also occurred periodically in past years, including a notable 2024 outbreak linked to Wisconsin-based Milo’s Poultry Farms that sickened more than 60 people across nine states after environmental testing at that company’s facilities also came back positive for the bacterium.

What consumers should do

Health officials advise consumers to check any egg cartons purchased from the listed retailers against the specific product codes and date ranges outlined in the recall notice. Eggs matching the recalled codes should not be eaten and should either be discarded or returned to the place of purchase for a refund. Anyone who has already consumed recalled eggs and is experiencing symptoms consistent with salmonella infection, including persistent fever, diarrhea or vomiting, is advised to contact a healthcare provider, particularly if they fall into a higher-risk group such as young children, older adults or individuals with compromised immune systems.

As of Thursday, Midwest Poultry Services had not disclosed the specific cause of the contamination at its two affected Texas farms, and the FDA has not indicated whether the recall could expand to include additional production sites or brands. The agency, along with the company, is expected to continue monitoring the situation and to issue updates if additional information about the source of the contamination or any related illnesses emerges in the coming days.

Xbox Network, formerly known as Xbox Live, was among the services affected by a widespread Microsoft outage Thursday, with players reporting problems signing in and connecting to online games as part of a broader disruption spanning much of Microsoft’s product lineup.

Outage-tracking service Downdetector said user reports indicating problems with Xbox Network began climbing at 12:16 p.m. Eastern time, with the hashtag #XboxNetworkXboxLiveDown circulating on social media shortly after as affected players sought to determine the scope of the issue.

Part of a much larger Microsoft outage

Thursday’s Xbox Network reports came roughly 90 minutes after a broader Microsoft 365 outage began disrupting access to a wide range of the company’s products. According to Downdetector, complaints about Microsoft’s core services began surging just after 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, eventually affecting Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Copilot, Azure, the Microsoft Store, OpenAI and Xbox Live, among other services.

Microsoft acknowledged the disruption on social media platform X at 11:24 a.m. Eastern time. “We’re investigating reports of issues with Microsoft 365 services,” the company posted, without specifically naming Xbox Network in that initial statement even as outage reports for the gaming service climbed in the following hour.

What Xbox players reported

Players affected by Thursday’s disruption described being unable to connect to Xbox’s servers across multiple games, according to reports collected by outage-tracking service StatusGator. Some users reported the issue extended beyond Xbox consoles themselves, saying they encountered the same connection problems when attempting to use Xbox Cloud Gaming on mobile devices, suggesting the outage was tied to backend account and sign-in infrastructure shared across Xbox’s various platforms rather than an issue isolated to any single device type.

Because Xbox Network handles core account functions, including sign-ins, multiplayer connectivity and digital purchases, an outage affecting that underlying service can prevent players from accessing not just online multiplayer games but, in some cases, offline single-player titles that still require an initial network authentication check before launching.

A history of Xbox-specific outages

Thursday’s disruption adds to a pattern of periodic Xbox Network outages over the past several years. The service experienced a particularly severe, nearly seven-hour global outage in July 2024, during which players in multiple countries, including the United States, Brazil, Japan and France, were unable to sign in or play games, even titles not typically requiring an internet connection. That earlier outage peaked at roughly 38,000 Downdetector reports before Microsoft resolved the issue and restored full service.

More recently, Xbox Network experienced another round of sign-in and game-launch problems in June of this year, with users reporting server connection errors despite their consoles showing an active internet connection. That earlier June disruption, like Thursday’s outage, was also tracked primarily through user reports on Downdetector rather than an immediate, detailed public acknowledgment from Microsoft.

How today’s outage compares

As of early Thursday afternoon, Xbox-specific outage reports appeared more limited in scale than the 2024 incident, with Downdetector recording roughly 2,256 views on its social media post about the Xbox disruption as of 12:16 p.m., a smaller initial signal compared with past major Xbox-specific outages, though report volume can shift quickly as more users become aware of and begin reporting an issue.

Independent monitoring services offered a mixed picture of the outage’s severity. UptimeRobot’s automated status checks, run periodically throughout the day, did not detect unusual response times or error codes from Xbox’s core web infrastructure as of mid-afternoon, while StatusGator’s crowdsourced tracking showed Xbox Live services as officially “operational” even as it continued to log a small but elevated number of user-submitted outage reports.

That discrepancy is not unusual during a distributed outage: automated uptime checks against a company’s public-facing website often continue functioning normally even when a related backend service, such as user authentication or account sign-in, is experiencing problems that only become apparent to users actively trying to log in or launch a game.

Why this outage may be connected to the broader Microsoft disruption

Given that Thursday’s Xbox Network reports emerged in the same window as Microsoft’s much larger 365 outage, and that Microsoft’s own Downdetector-tracked services list explicitly included Xbox Live among the affected products, it appears likely that the Xbox issues stemmed from the same underlying infrastructure problem affecting Microsoft’s broader cloud and identity services, rather than representing a separate, unrelated Xbox-specific failure. Microsoft has not issued a statement specifically addressing Xbox Network’s role within the broader outage as of Thursday afternoon.

What Microsoft has said so far

Beyond its initial 11:24 a.m. acknowledgment on X, Microsoft directed system administrators to a specific incident number, MO1437424, within the Microsoft 365 admin center for updates on the broader outage. The company’s Service Health Status page showed a status of “service degradation” for Microsoft 365 as of Thursday morning, though Microsoft had not disclosed a specific cause or expected resolution time for the disruption as a whole, including its apparent impact on Xbox Network.

What affected players can do

Xbox players experiencing sign-in or connectivity issues are generally advised to check Xbox’s official support channels and status page for updates, since there is typically little an individual user can do to resolve a server-side outage independently. Some players affected by past Xbox outages have found temporary workarounds, such as manually switching their console to offline mode to access certain offline-capable content, though such workarounds do not restore full online functionality and are not guaranteed to work consistently across different games or account configurations.

As of Thursday afternoon, it remained unclear how long the Xbox Network disruption, or the broader Microsoft 365 outage it appears connected to, would continue. Based on the pattern of Microsoft’s past large-scale outages, a formal resolution and status update is typically expected only once the company’s engineering teams have identified and addressed the underlying technical issue, a process that has taken anywhere from a few hours to most of a day in previous incidents affecting Microsoft’s various online services.

Shares of Cleveland-Cliffs surged more than 20% Thursday after the steel producer posted a smaller-than-expected second-quarter loss and announced a new multiyear Defense Department contract, giving investors a double dose of good news following weeks of sharp declines in the stock.

Cleveland-Cliffs traded at $11.35, up $1.90, as of 12:42 p.m. Eastern time. The rally builds on a stretch of intraday buying that began at the market open, with shares climbing from roughly $10.67 to as high as $11.25 before settling near session highs.

Second-quarter results beat expectations

Cleveland-Cliffs reported second-quarter 2026 revenues of $5.2 billion, a $300 million increase from the previous quarter and roughly in line with Wall Street’s consensus estimate of $5.18 billion. The company posted a GAAP net loss of $134 million, or $0.25 per diluted share, with an adjusted net loss of $0.20 per diluted share, an improvement over the $0.21 per share loss analysts had been expecting on average heading into the report.

The quarter marked a significant improvement from the company’s first-quarter performance. Cleveland-Cliffs posted a GAAP net loss of $229 million, or $0.42 per diluted share, in the first quarter of 2026, meaning the company roughly halved its per-share loss quarter over quarter. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $286 million for the second quarter, a $191 million improvement compared with the $95 million recorded in the first quarter. Operating cash flow for the quarter was $230 million, and the company reported liquidity of $3.1 billion as of June 30.

A new defense contract adds to the momentum

Beyond the earnings beat, Cleveland-Cliffs also benefited Thursday from news of a new sole-source, five-year contract with the Defense Logistics Agency worth up to $400 million. Under the agreement, Cleveland-Cliffs will supply grain-oriented electrical steel to multiple branches of the U.S. military through 2030, adding a defense-sector revenue stream to a company whose business has historically centered heavily on automotive-grade steel products.

CEO points to a stronger second half ahead

Cleveland-Cliffs Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Lourenco Goncalves struck an optimistic tone about the company’s trajectory heading into the back half of the year. “Looking ahead, we have clear visibility into the continuous earnings improvement that began during the first half of the year,” Goncalves said. “With average selling prices, volumes, and costs all moving in the right direction, our second-half earnings performance should be our strongest since 2021 as Q4 EBITDA is currently expected to even further exceed our Q3 guidance. We expect to finish the year on a positive note and enter 2027 with significant momentum and additional opportunities for upside, including the higher reset of fixed price contracts and much improved profits in Canada.”

A stock that had fallen sharply heading into earnings

Thursday’s rally comes after a difficult stretch for Cleveland-Cliffs shares. The stock had declined roughly 24% over the 30 days leading up to the earnings report and was down nearly 32% year-to-date as of earlier this week, reflecting broader investor caution around the domestic steel industry tied to pricing power, capacity utilization and competition from imported steel. Shares had traded as low as $8.84 just three days before Thursday’s report, before climbing to close near $11.21 following the earnings release and defense contract announcement.

Options markets had anticipated significant volatility heading into the report. According to data compiled by Bloomberg, options pricing implied an 11% potential move in Cleveland-Cliffs shares on earnings day, a figure the stock has exceeded in five of its last eight quarterly reports. The company’s largest historical earnings-day swing came in October 2025, when shares jumped 22.8% against a implied move of just 6.9%.

Mixed underlying fundamentals

Despite Thursday’s rally, Cleveland-Cliffs’ broader financial picture remains complicated. The company generated approximately $18.61 billion in revenue over the trailing 12 months, but continues to operate with thin to negative margins, posting a profit margin of roughly negative 6% and negative free cash flow of around $477 million over that period. The company’s most recent quarterly net loss, prior to the improvement reflected in Thursday’s report, had been roughly $237 million.

Ahead of the earnings release, analyst sentiment on the stock had been notably split. Some market observers viewed Cleveland-Cliffs as a beaten-down steel producer trading below its intrinsic value, pointing to a fair value estimate of $10.86 per share compared with a pre-earnings trading price of around $9.28, a valuation gap bulls attributed to the company’s ongoing cost-reduction efforts, including strategic footprint optimization and internal coke and feedstock integration. Bears, meanwhile, pointed to the company’s recent losses and uncertainty heading into the earnings report as reasons for caution.

A company built around North American steel

Cleveland-Cliffs is a leading North America-based steel producer with a particular focus on value-added sheet products for the automotive industry, operating manufacturing facilities across the United States and Canada. The company’s business has historically been closely tied to automotive demand, making the newly announced defense contract a notable diversification move into a different end market with long-term, government-backed demand visibility through 2030.

With Cleveland-Cliffs management projecting its strongest second-half earnings performance since 2021, investors will be watching closely to see whether the improving trends in average selling prices, sales volumes and cost management highlighted by Goncalves continue to materialize over the coming quarters. The company’s next scheduled updates, including any further detail on its fixed-price contract resets and progress on profitability in its Canadian operations, are likely to serve as key checkpoints for determining whether Thursday’s sharp rally reflects the start of a sustained recovery or a shorter-term reaction to a single strong quarter following weeks of investor pessimism.

Sam Lamiroy said Burnham’s announcement is a step in the right direction and shows the government is trying to help, but agrees with Nick Smith that “VAT is the real problem”.

He said the turnover of a typical pub or restaurant can easily be between £500,000 and £1m, meaning a £1,000 saving “won’t make much difference”.

“The 20% drop in business rates is really just lip service, it won’t affect whether we survive or not, the real lever to pull is help with VAT, dropping the rate from 20% to 10% as it is in the rest of Europe,” he told the BBC.

Lamiroy also said he fears his Penzance-based bar and restaurant, 45 Queen Street, will not be considered a “pub” and so be ineligible under the terms of the support package.

And, urging the government to do more to support hospitality businesses, he said: “These are the first jobs for a lot of young people, it is a springboard into work.

“When these places shut, it’s not just my business and income that disappears, it is the entire team.”

Inflation has fallen both in the UK – down to 2.6% in the year to June helped by slowing diesel and petrol prices – and in the US to 3.5%.

But questions remain whether the slow down will prove short-lived due to the renewed conflict in the Middle East.

New data released on Thursday showed that UK petrol prices have risen by 5p a litre since the beginning of July, hitting reaching almost £1.56.

Diesel is at £1.72 a litre, on average, according to the RAC.

Average gasoline prices in the US have surpassed $4 a gallon once more, up from $3.92 a month ago, according to motorist advocacy group AAA.

“More expensive fuel and energy can ripple through the wider economy, increasing costs for businesses and ultimately feeding through into the price of food and other goods,” said Jonathan Raymond, investment manager at Quilter Cheviot.

“This creates another headache for central banks as they continue their battle against inflation.

“If energy prices remain elevated, policymakers may come under pressure to keep interest rates higher for longer or even raise them. This would come as a blow to mortgage holders and borrowers already feeling the strain.”

The Bank of England, which sets UK interest rates, has held them at 3.75% in its last four meetings.

Paul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital Economics, said he believed the Bank will “almost certainly” hold them again. But he said analysts still expected that interest rates could be cut next year if energy price rises ease.

Kevin Warsh, the newly-appointed chair of the US Federal Reserve, last week told Congress that the central bank had “no tolerance to persistently elevated inflation”.

US President Donald Trump had pushed Warsh’s predecessor, Jerome Powell, to cut interest rates.

Trump has made it clear he expects Warsh to fulfil his demand for reductions in borrowing costs for Americans.

But the Fed held US interest rates between 3.5% and 3.75% at Warsh’s first meeting last month. He also told Congress that he was committed to “restoring price stability” in the wake of the Middle East conflict impacting prices.

A widespread outage affecting Microsoft 365 disrupted access to Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, the Microsoft Store and several other services Thursday morning, with thousands of users across the country reporting problems logging in or completing basic tasks.

According to outage-tracking service Downdetector, complaints began surging just after 10:30 a.m. Eastern time. By 11:11 a.m., Downdetector had recorded 2,403 reports specifically tied to Microsoft 365, sharply above the service’s normal baseline of roughly 29 reports. That number climbed further as the morning progressed, with more than 6,000 users reporting problems with Microsoft 365 shortly after, and total reports eventually surpassing 8,000 across Microsoft’s broader suite of services.

Which services were affected

The outage spread across a wide range of Microsoft products. Downdetector showed elevated reports for Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Excel, the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, Outlook, OneDrive, Copilot, Azure, Xbox Live and the Microsoft Store. Among the specific complaints tracked around 11:11 a.m., SharePoint accounted for 78% of reported issues, followed by Excel at 11% and the Admin Center at 6%.

Some users also reported difficulty downloading Windows updates or installing Microsoft Office applications, according to posts shared on Reddit. Separately, users of Microsoft Teams described being unable to save new meetings to their calendars, even though existing meetings could still be edited and impromptu meetings could still be started, a specific glitch that outage-tracking service StatusGator noted had actually been affecting some users for roughly 12 hours prior to Thursday’s broader disruption.

Microsoft’s response

Microsoft acknowledged the disruption Thursday morning. “We’re investigating reports of issues with Microsoft 365 services,” the company posted on social media platform X at 11:24 a.m. Eastern time. The company directed system administrators to a specific incident listing, MO1437424, within the Microsoft 365 admin center for additional information and ongoing updates. Microsoft’s own Service Health Status page reflected the acknowledgment, showing a status of “service degradation” for Microsoft 365 as of Thursday morning.

As of early afternoon, Microsoft had not provided a specific timeline for resolving the outage or disclosed a root cause, with several outlets covering the disruption noting that both the cause and expected duration of the interruption remained unknown.

A pattern of recurring disruptions

Thursday’s outage adds to a string of Microsoft 365 disruptions over the past year. A Microsoft 365 outage in January affected thousands of users for several hours before being resolved, and a separate outage specifically affecting Microsoft Outlook lasted for hours in April. Microsoft Teams also experienced a significant standalone outage in recent days, going down for several hours due to what the company described as a broken connection to an internal storage service introduced during a recent software deployment.

That earlier Teams-specific outage, which primarily affected users overnight when much of Europe and Asia were offline, illustrated how the timing of a disruption can significantly shape its real-world impact even when the underlying technical problem is serious. Thursday’s outage, by contrast, struck squarely during U.S. business hours, meaning far more users were actively relying on the affected services at the moment problems began.

Broader context around Microsoft

The outage comes at a notable moment for Microsoft more broadly. Earlier this month, the company filed a formal WARN notice disclosing 605 permanent layoffs at its Redmond, Washington headquarters, effective Sept. 4, part of a broader wave of workforce reductions the company has carried out this year. While there is no indication the layoffs are connected to Thursday’s technical issues, the timing has drawn additional attention to the company’s operations during a period of significant organizational change.

Downdetector also recorded elevated outage reports Thursday for several other major online services around the same general timeframe, including Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, OpenAI, Fortnite and Dropbox, though those separate reports were limited to a few thousand complaints each and appeared unrelated to Microsoft’s specific outage.

Why these outages happen

Large-scale cloud service disruptions like Thursday’s typically stem from issues within a provider’s own backend infrastructure, ranging from faulty software deployments to configuration errors affecting how different services communicate with one another. Because so many Microsoft 365 products, including Teams, SharePoint, Outlook and OneDrive, share common underlying infrastructure, a single technical fault can often cascade across multiple, seemingly unrelated services simultaneously, which appears consistent with the broad range of products affected Thursday.

What affected users can do

For users experiencing ongoing issues, Microsoft’s guidance directs system administrators to check the Microsoft 365 admin center for the specific incident number associated with Thursday’s outage, where the company is expected to post updates as its investigation continues. Individual users without administrator access are generally advised to monitor Microsoft’s official status channels and outage-tracking platforms like Downdetector for updates, since there is typically little an individual user can do to resolve a server-side outage on their own.

What we don’t know yet

As of Thursday afternoon, Microsoft had not disclosed what caused the disruption, how many total users were affected globally, or when full service would be restored. Given the company’s history of resolving similar large-scale outages within a matter of hours, a resolution may come relatively quickly, though the exact timeline remains uncertain pending further updates from Microsoft.

What to watch for

Users looking for real-time updates on the status of their Microsoft 365 services are encouraged to check Microsoft’s official Service Health Status page directly or continue monitoring outage-tracking platforms for changes in reported issue volume. Based on the pattern of previous disruptions this year, a formal statement confirming full restoration of services is likely to follow once Microsoft’s engineering teams have identified and resolved the underlying technical issue behind Thursday’s outage.