LOS ANGELES — Apex Legends faced connectivity and login issues for hundreds of players on Thursday, May 21, 2026, according to widespread user reports and outage tracking platforms.

The account @status_is_down posted on X at approximately 2:17 p.m. GMT: “Apex Legends is reportedly down for hundreds of gamers currently. Are you one of them?” The post linked to a community discussion thread on designtaxi.com.

Downdetector and other monitoring sites recorded elevated reports throughout the afternoon, with game launch, server connection and matchmaking issues as the primary complaints. Reports remained moderate compared to major historical outages but affected players across multiple regions.

EA and Respawn Entertainment had not issued an official statement on the incident as of late afternoon May 21. The companies typically post updates on their official social channels and service status pages during service disruptions.

Players reported difficulties logging into the game, joining matches or maintaining stable connections. Issues appeared intermittent rather than a full global shutdown, with some users able to access the game after waiting periods of 10–15 minutes.

This follows a pattern of occasional technical hiccups for the popular battle royale title, which has millions of daily active players across PC, PlayStation and Xbox platforms. Apex Legends Season 23 was active at the time of the outage.

Community reactions on X included frustration from players who had planned gaming sessions after work or school. One user posted: “yup i wanted to play some after work but welp.” Another wrote: “It’s not starting bro.”

Some players reported eventual success after waiting. One comment read: “Yes, I’m in now, but I waited like 15min!” Others expressed disappointment over lost time, with one noting: “what in the fuck. I skipped school for ts.”

Apex Legends, developed by Respawn Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts, launched in 2019 and has maintained a large player base through regular seasonal updates, new legends, maps and battle pass content. The game blends free-to-play mechanics with cosmetic microtransactions.

No specific cause for the May 21 issues was confirmed by EA or Respawn. Common triggers for such outages include server maintenance, unexpected technical glitches, high concurrent player loads or third-party network problems.

The game’s competitive scene, including ALGS (Apex Legends Global Series) events, was not immediately impacted by the player-side outage reports. Official tournament servers often operate on separate infrastructure.

Players experiencing issues were advised by the community to try standard troubleshooting steps: restarting the client, checking internet connections, verifying game files through their platform launcher, or waiting for server-side resolution.

Apex Legends maintains dedicated service status pages through EA and Respawn. As of late afternoon May 21, no widespread outage was officially listed, suggesting the problems were regional or resolving gradually.

The incident highlights the reliance of modern live-service games on stable server infrastructure. With millions of concurrent players during peak hours, even brief disruptions can affect thousands of users worldwide.

EA and Respawn have a history of transparent communication during major outages, often providing estimated resolution times and compensation such as in-game currency or battle pass progress when appropriate. No such offers had been announced for this event.

Fan discussions continued on platforms like Reddit, X and the official Apex Legends forums, with users sharing screenshots of error messages and login queues. The hashtag #ApexLegendsDown trended briefly during the peak of reports.

As of 4 p.m. EDT on May 21, many players reported that connectivity had improved or fully returned. The situation remained fluid, with some users still experiencing intermittent issues.

Apex Legends continues to receive regular content updates, including new seasons, legends, weapons and limited-time modes. Season 23 was ongoing at the time of the reported disruption.

The game’s large player community often rallies during outages by sharing workarounds and updates. Developers encourage reporting technical problems through official support channels for faster resolution.

This partial outage represents a relatively minor and short-lived disruption for the popular title. Services appeared to stabilize throughout the afternoon without requiring extended maintenance.

Mortgage rates jumped this week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday.

Freddie Mac’s latest Primary Mortgage Market Survey, released Thursday, showed the average rate on the benchmark 30-year fixed mortgage climbed to 6.51% from last week’s reading of 6.36%. 

The average rate on a 30-year loan was 6.86% a year ago.

The average rate on the benchmark 30-year fixed mortgage climbed to 6.51%. (Getty Images)

“As rates fluctuate, aspiring buyers should remember that by shopping around for the best mortgage rate and getting multiple quotes, they can potentially save thousands,” said Sam Khater, Freddie Mac’s chief economist.

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The average rate on a 15-year fixed mortgage rose to 5.85% from last week’s reading of 5.71%.

“The conflict in the Middle East continues to play an outsized role in how investors are assessing the economic outlook, and mortgage rates are moving accordingly,” said Realtor.com senior economist Anthony Smith. “In recent weeks, headlines suggesting escalation have tended to push longer-term yields higher, while signs of progress toward resolution have had the opposite effect. That dynamic, rather than any domestic policy development, remains the primary force shaping borrowing costs right now.”

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The average rate on a 15-year fixed mortgage rose to 5.85%. (Fox News)

The rise in mortgage rates comes a day before President Donald Trump is due to swear in Kevin Warsh as the Federal Reserve’s new chair, succeeding Jerome Powell, whom Trump criticized tirelessly for keeping interest rates too high.

Notwithstanding the change in guard, financial markets are betting the central bank will not cut short-term rates at all this year and may actually increase them if higher oil prices work their way into inflation more broadly, as some Fed policymakers say they worry is already happening.

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“A Fed leadership transition is underway this week, but given that the chair is one vote among many, and that a resurgence in inflation is likely to reinforce caution among FOMC members regardless of leadership, that story is unlikely to move rates in a meaningful way,” Smith said.

Trump this week told the Washington Examiner that he will let Warsh do as he wishes with rates, and Warsh told lawmakers last month that he has made Trump no promises.

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Mortgage rates are affected by several factors, including the Federal Reserve and geopolitics. Though mortgage rates are not directly affected by the Fed’s interest rate decisions, they closely track the 10-year Treasury yield. The 10-year yield hovered around 4.57% as of Thursday afternoon.

Reuters contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump has invested millions of dollars into the popular revolving sushi chain Kura Sushi USA.

The purchase was among a series of investments Trump made in early 2026, according to a report detailing his financial transactions. The document, signed by Trump on May 8, was released last Thursday by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

The investment, valued between $1 million and $5 million, was made on Feb. 2.

Based in Irvine, California, Kura Sushi operates 88 restaurant locations across 22 states and the District of Colombia, with a total of more than 650 worldwide. The chain is known for its revolving conveyor-belt sushi service, where diners select plates as the items pass each table.

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President Donald Trump smiles as he participates in a Small Business Summit in Washington, D.C., on May 4, 2026. (Kent Nishimura / AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)

According to the filing, Trump purchased Class A common stock in Kura Sushi USA Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of the Japan-based restaurant chain.

The transaction was listed as “solicited,” meaning the investment recommendation came from a financial broker or investment adviser managing the account.

The Trump Organization has previously reported that his accounts are managed by third-party financial institutions without input from Trump or his family in an effort to avoid potential conflicts of interest.

Trump’s investments are “maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions,” Kimberly Benza, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization, told NOTUS on Thursday. 

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Sushi plates move along a rotating conveyor belt inside a restaurant. (iStock / iStock)

The president has previously been reported to dislike raw fish. According to the 1993 book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, Trump said he would not “eat any f—ing raw fish” during a 1990 visit to Japan, according to Mashed.

While the total value of Trump’s transactions was not specifically disclosed, the reported range of stock purchases and sales totaled hundreds of millions of dollars. 

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Sushi plates move along a conveyor belt at Sushi rail Japanese restaurant. (iStock / iStock)

Trump also made major sales involving holdings in Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, with transactions valued between $5 million and $25 million.

Kura Sushi was not the only restaurant-related investment listed in the portfolio. Trump also reportedly purchased shares in Chipotle Mexican Grill valued between $500,000 and $1 million, Domino’s Pizza valued between $250,000 and $500,000, and Starbucks valued between $50,000 and $100,000.

The founder of 4Networking lost a £2 million business in an afternoon, then spent four years being smeared online by a woman he had met for 30 seconds.

In an unflinching conversation with Richard Alvin, he describes the four seconds that nearly ended it all, and the platform failures he now wants the next Secretary of State to put right.

There is a moment, about twenty minutes into our conversation, when Brad Burton goes very still. We are talking about the period in 2022 when his business had collapsed, his stalker was posting fifteen lies a day across LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and X, and the platforms were responding to his complaints with cut-and-paste boilerplate. He is sitting at his desk in Somerset, the same desk he sat at then.

“Four seconds,” he says. “For four seconds, I thought I can’t do this anymore.” He pauses. “Luckily those four seconds happened when I was sat at my desk, as in another setting the outcome might have been different, either way it motivated me to go to the doctors and get some antidepressants. Hadn’t done them for 25 years. That just shows you how severe this was.”

It is a remark, delivered in the matter-of-fact Salford cadence familiar to anyone who has ever booked Burton for a keynote, that reframes the whole interview. Britain’s self-styled “number one motivational speaker”, the man who built 4Networking from a £25,000 debt and a pile of pizza delivery sheets in 2006 into the country’s largest face-to-face business network — was, on his own admission, four seconds from a very different ending.

We had sat down for the latest edition of the ‘In Conversation Podcast’ to talk about three things, all of them, in his view, urgent for anyone running a small business in 2026: how you rebuild when turnover goes to zero with no playbook; what happens when the professional platform you have anchored your reputation to stops protecting you; and what resilience, mental, financial, reputational, actually looks like on the other side. They proved to be the same story.

From £2.3 million to nought in a single afternoon

The first collapse was televised. On 20 March 2020, with 4Networking turning over £2.3 million a year at its peak and running 5,000 face-to-face breakfast meetings in Premier Inns and Brewers Fayre up and down the country, Boris Johnson told the country to stay at home.

“When you’re running 5,000 networking meetings in Brewers Fayres and Holiday Inn Expresses up and down the land, that’s a problem,” Burton says, with characteristic understatement. The original assumption that “this will be a short pause, we’ll be back”, turned into a “dance of the seven veils”, a fortnightly extension that he believes did more damage than honesty would have.

Burton’s response was to invoke what he calls his 24/24/24 framework. “If I can’t make a decision in 24 seconds, revisit in 24 minutes. If after 24 minutes I can’t make a decision, I revisit in 24 hours. If after 24 hours I can’t make a decision, I’ve just made a decision, it’s not important. Next.” Within days, 4Networking had become the first network in the country to move wholesale onto Zoom, under the banner 4N Online. He calls it “drawing a picture of a sandwich when you’re hungry”, a holding measure rather than a substitute. He exited the company in 2022.

That should have been the story: a textbook British SME pivot, a clean founder exit, a man in his early fifties moving on to keynotes and books. It was not.

Thirty seconds at Aston Villa

In January 2019, at one of Burton’s personal development events at Aston Villa Football Club, a woman in an audience of around 200 was introduced to him by a mutual contact and asked for a selfie. The exchange lasted less than a minute. Her name was Sam Wall.

A year later, with Britain locked down and Burton’s identity as the country’s networking-in-chief evaporating in real time, Wall began posting on social media. The first post was vague; the second referenced “a high-profile speaker”; the third named him. Within days she had 30,000 LinkedIn followers, more than Burton’s own, and was alleging he had given her death threats, poisoned her cat, slashed her tyres and put a tracker on her car. Burton was 200 miles away in Somerset throughout lockdown.

“I was 200 miles away in lockdown and being accused of poisoning her cat — and Linkedin did nothing”

“People don’t do checks and measures on social media,” he says. “It was a modern-day witch hunt. I was guilty until proven innocent.” A cease-and-desist letter, served at a cost of £3,000, was promptly photographed and posted to her feed beneath the caption: “I’m not allowing this guy to bully me into submission.” Supporters cheered her on. Speaking engagements began to be quietly cancelled. Family members were drawn in.

The legal road, when he finally took it, was as slow as it was bruising. A statement given at Taunton police station vanished from the system. Wall was arrested, bailed for 30 days, “30 days of peace”, and resumed her campaign, in Burton’s recollection, “30 days and 10 minutes later”. She forged what purported to be a stalker protection order against him and posted it online. She wrote a 22,000-word article about him on LinkedIn. By his own count, she made roughly 500 posts about him across the major platforms over four years.

In March 2025, the case finally reached a national audience. BBC Panorama broadcast My Online Stalker, presented by Darragh MacIntyre, with Burton and the Manchester tech entrepreneur Naomi Timperley as its central voices. Channel 4’s Social Media Monsters followed with a second-episode treatment of the same case. ITV covered the sentencing. In October 2025, at Minshull Street Crown Court, Sam Wall was jailed for 28 months for what Judge Neil Usher described as a “prolonged, deliberate and calculated” campaign and an “unrelenting barrage” that was “breathtaking” in its scope.

Burton’s case is one of the fewer than two per cent of stalking complaints in this country that result in a conviction.

“There is no leadership at LinkedIn”

It is the response of the platforms, and one platform in particular, that animates him now. Wall’s LinkedIn account, as of publication, remains live, and so does much of the content she posted about him. Business Matters has previously reported on the mounting pressure on LinkedIn to act.

“We contacted LinkedIn legals. We contacted support. We tagged in everybody,” Burton says. “Not a single piece of content came down. We had people from America come on Zoom calls, they wouldn’t even turn the cameras on, saying, ‘She’s not doing anything illegal.’ I said, ‘What happens if she gets convicted?’ They said, ‘If she gets convicted, do let us know and we’ll see what we can do.’ So guess what? We let them know. They did nothing about it.”

Top-tier legal advice, he says, surfaced a structural problem: LinkedIn hides behind European law jurisdictionally rooted in Ireland and corporate decision-making rooted in California. “They’ve got this double moat. Nobody wanted to champion it.” Reporting Wall’s account, by design, blocked the reporter from her output rather than removing it. “That’s not a solution.”

If he had ten minutes with the Secretary of State and LinkedIn’s UK MD, what would he ask for? “Imagine if on your platform, I called you this, and I said this about your family. Would you ignore it and block me? Or would you make some changes and get me off the platform? That is exactly what should have happened here. Your business is people, and that’s the bit that’s been lost.” He goes further: there is, he says, “no leadership” at the UK level. “Nobody stepped forward and said, ‘I’m the UK managing director. I’m going to sort this crap.’”

It is a critique that lands at a moment when the regulatory tide is turning. The Online Safety Act is reshaping platform obligations in the UK, and stalking prosecutions, although still woefully low against a high base of reported offences, are at a record high. Burton’s case is the gap between the law and its enforcement made flesh.

Building the antidote

What Burton always does, and is doing again, is build. His new venture, Motivational Business Network, has opened for paid membership at £75 a month, vetted, deliberately slow, and capped at the kind of room size where, as he puts it, “you go and put yourself in a room with 50 people who are on side and positive, and tell me that’s a waste of time.”

The product cue is something called Shine: every member receives 100 daily “Shine points” they can award to others for genuine help, the awards visible on a member’s profile as social proof. “When everyone’s shouting, no one’s listening,” he says. “We’ve got to start getting quieter. We’ve got to start talking again. Less AI, more human.”

He pauses, the Salford grin back in place. “When I built 4Networking, it was a wobbly Jenga tower. This time we’re building it slow, methodical. No rush. Let’s get it right, not right now, which goes 100 per cent against everything I’ve ever done.”

For a man who came within four seconds of a different outcome, “right, not right now” sounds less like a strapline and more like a hard-won operating principle. British business, and the platforms that profess to serve it, would do well to take the note.

Amy Ingham

Amy is a newly qualified journalist specialising in business journalism at Business Matters with responsibility for news content for what is now the UK’s largest print and online source of current business news.

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Kraft Heinz is bringing a cleaner-label makeover to one of America’s most iconic desserts.

The company announced Tuesday that it is launching Jell-O Simply, a new line of gelatin products made without artificial sweeteners or FD&C artificial colors, as consumers increasingly seek foods with simpler, more recognizable ingredients. 

The updated recipe also uses real fruit juice and contains 25% less sugar than traditional Jell-O products, according to Kraft Heinz.

“For more than 125 years, Jell-O has brought colorful, jiggly fun to dessert tables across America,” Kraft Heinz said in a statement. “Now, one of the country’s most iconic food brands is entering a new era.”

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Kraft Heinz announced Tuesday that it is launching Jell-O Simply, a new line of gelatin products made without artificial sweeteners or FD&C artificial colors. (Kraft Heinz)

The launch comes as food companies face growing pressure from consumers and policymakers to simplify ingredient labels.

“We know families are looking for treats that strike the right balance between great taste and ingredients they can feel good about – and they don’t want to sacrifice the brands they know and love to get there,” Kathryn O’Brien, head of marketing of desserts at Kraft Heinz, said in a statement. 

“Jell-O Simply delivers everything people love about Jell-O – the delicious taste, the iconic jiggle and the vibrant fun – now made with no FD&C colors or artificial sweeteners. It’s a meaningful evolution for the brand and an important milestone in Kraft Heinz’s broader modernization journey.”

Jell-O Simply ready-to-eat cups are available nationwide now for $3.99 per four-pack and come in orange, raspberry lemonade and blueberry flavors.

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Kraft Heinz’s Jell-O pudding and gelatin for sale at a grocery store on Dec. 30, 2025, near Lake Tahoe in Zephyr Cove, California.  (Al Drago/Getty Images)

Kraft Heinz said additional Jell-O Simply gelatin and instant pudding mixes will hit store shelves nationwide in August for $2.24 per box, with flavors including vanilla, chocolate, banana and strawberry.

The rollout is part of Kraft Heinz’s broader effort to eliminate FD&C artificial colors from its U.S. product portfolio by the end of 2027, including the entire Jell-O lineup.

The move comes amid increased federal scrutiny of synthetic food dyes.

In January 2025, during the final few days of the Biden administration, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned Red 3 from the U.S. food supply.

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The move comes amid increased federal scrutiny of synthetic food dyes. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

A few months later, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the FDA announced plans to phase out petroleum-based food dyes as part of the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative.

“We’re restoring gold-standard science, applying common sense, and beginning to earn back the public’s trust,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in a statement at the time. “And we’re doing it by working with industry to get these toxic dyes out of the foods our families eat every day.”

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