Players of Brawl Stars, the popular mobile battle game developed by Finnish gaming company Supercell, began reporting access problems Thursday morning, with outage-tracking site Downdetector logging a spike in complaints starting around 10:30 a.m. EDT.

The outage tracker’s official account flagged the surge in a post shortly after the reports began, asking affected users how the disruption was impacting them and directing people to its live outage dashboard for updates. The hashtag “BrawlStarsDown” began circulating on social media as players compared notes on the issue.

Thursday’s disruption reports coincide with the anticipated start of Season 54 in Brawl Stars, following the conclusion of the game’s previous season, known as Windstock. According to gaming outlets tracking Supercell’s update schedule, the current season, Season 53: Windstock, was expected to conclude on Sept. 3, with a major maintenance window widely anticipated between Sept. 1 and Sept. 3 to accommodate the transition into the new season.

Supercell had not officially announced the exact start time for the anticipated maintenance break as of earlier this week, though gaming trackers following the update cycle had flagged the Sept. 1-3 window as the most likely period for the change, given that Windstock served as the final season covered under the game’s current “Ramen Rebellion” content update. Major seasonal transitions of this kind typically require Supercell to take Brawl Stars offline briefly while new content, balance changes and season-specific features are pushed to players’ devices.

Brawl Stars has a documented history of temporary server disruptions tied to scheduled maintenance windows, which the game’s developer typically uses to implement bug fixes, balance adjustments to individual playable characters known as Brawlers, and the rollout of new seasonal content. The game’s most recent prior maintenance break, which took place on Aug. 4, was used by Supercell to apply bug fixes addressing issues involving several Brawlers, along with adjustments to the game’s respawn protection mechanics and the introduction of a system called NanoPower alongside broader Brawler balance changes.

Beyond scheduled maintenance, Brawl Stars and other Supercell-published titles have occasionally experienced more significant, unplanned server outages. In one notable prior incident, Supercell’s servers went down across multiple of the company’s flagship titles, including Brawl Stars, Clash of Clans and Clash Royale, preventing players from logging into their accounts entirely. During that earlier outage, some players encountered error messages suggesting a server-side failure, and many expressed concern on social media that their game progress or account data might have been lost entirely, before Supercell’s development teams confirmed the issue was tied to a backend server problem rather than any loss of player data.

Supercell has historically addressed major service disruptions by posting updates directly through the official social media accounts associated with each affected game, a pattern that has continued through subsequent outages affecting the company’s titles. As of Thursday morning, it remained unclear whether Supercell had issued a specific public statement addressing the cause of the reported access issues, or whether the disruption was tied directly to the rollout of Season 54 content rather than a separate, unrelated technical problem.

Independent, crowdsourced outage-tracking services that monitor Brawl Stars on a rolling basis had shown the game operating normally in the days immediately preceding Thursday’s reports, with one tracker recording just six user-submitted reports over the preceding 24-hour period as of Sept. 1, none of which occurred within the final hour of that monitoring window. That relatively low baseline level of reported issues makes Thursday’s spike in complaints, and the accompanying trending hashtag, a notable departure from the game’s recent pattern of reliability heading into the new season’s launch.

Brawl Stars, first released globally in 2018, has grown into one of Supercell’s most commercially successful titles, generating tens of millions of dollars in monthly in-app purchase revenue worldwide at its peak, according to industry data tracking the game’s performance. The game features fast-paced, short-format multiplayer battles in which players select from a roster of characters, known as Brawlers, each possessing unique abilities, and compete across a variety of game modes ranging from team-based objectives to free-for-all combat formats.

Seasonal content updates, such as the Season 54 rollout anticipated to coincide with Thursday’s reported disruption, typically introduce new Brawlers, cosmetic items, gameplay modes, and balance adjustments intended to keep the game’s competitive landscape fresh for its large base of active players. Because these updates often require significant backend changes to the game’s servers, brief periods of downtime or degraded performance immediately surrounding a major seasonal transition are relatively common across live-service mobile games more broadly, not just titles published by Supercell specifically.

For affected players experiencing access issues Thursday, standard troubleshooting guidance for Brawl Stars connectivity problems typically includes verifying an active and stable internet connection, restarting the game application, checking for and installing any pending app updates through the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, and clearing the application’s cache if the game continues to freeze or display error messages. Players are also generally advised against uninstalling the app entirely unless their game progress is confirmed to be linked to a Supercell ID account, since progress tied only to local device storage could otherwise be lost in the process of reinstalling.

As of Thursday late morning, it remained unclear how long the reported access issues would persist, or whether the disruption stemmed directly from the anticipated Season 54 content rollout, a separate unrelated technical issue, or a combination of both factors coinciding at once. Affected players were advised to monitor Brawl Stars’ official social media channels, along with independent outage trackers like Downdetector, for updates on when normal service would be fully restored following the game’s transition into its newest season.

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Michal Kuzawinski
Director of Investors Relations & Ownership Supervision

Good afternoon, everybody, and good morning to those who have joined us from behind the ocean. So we have today our H1 2026 results to discuss with you. We will have a presentation for you followed by a written Q&A session. [Operator Instructions]. We have with us today our CEO, Botond; and CFO, Jacek.

And I’ll hand over now to Botond to begin the presentation. Thank you.

Antal Rencz
CEO & President of the Management Board

Thank you very much, Michal. And I would like to welcome everybody to this call today. Very warm welcome probably because this summer, at least in Europe, was extremely warm. So I think everybody enjoyed their vacation. In case you didn’t, probably you will have a little bit calmer weather in September. But I’m very grateful that you have taken the time and you are joining us on this call.

Last time we covered the first quarter, now we are going to cover the first half, and Magda is going to show us the slides that we have. And the plan is that I give you a half-year highlights, and then Jacek will go into the details, and we are going to finish just like last time with the Q&A session.

So let me start with the headline picture for the first half. So Magda, if you don’t — okay, yes, we have now the numbers. So when we look at it, we can see that our rental activity — revenue from rental activity moved up 5% year-on-year with the underlying like-for-like 2%. We

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Nvidia Corp. confirmed Thursday that it has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, one of the world’s most widely used platforms for sharing and deploying open-source artificial intelligence models, in a deal valued at roughly $13 billion, extending the chipmaker’s push into the AI software and model ecosystem.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Nvidia entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face on Sept. 2. The transaction includes an approximately $11.9 billion purchase price payable to Hugging Face stockholders, subject to certain adjustments, along with an equity-based retention program of up to approximately $1.0 billion for Hugging Face employees joining Nvidia. The total deal value has been widely reported at $12.93 billion. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

Hugging Face operates a platform and community for developing, sharing and deploying open-source models, datasets and applications. According to Nvidia, more than 18 million developers, researchers and creators currently use the platform to share more than 3 million models, while more than 200,000 companies use Hugging Face to discover and deploy AI tools. The platform additionally hosts roughly 500,000 datasets and around 1 million applications, according to figures cited by TechCrunch.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed the acquisition as an extension of the company’s broader commitment to keeping AI development open and accessible, rather than as an effort to control or restrict how developers use the platform going forward.

“Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide,” Huang wrote in a statement announcing the deal.

Huang emphasized that Nvidia intends to preserve Hugging Face’s open, vendor-neutral character even under new ownership, addressing concerns that the acquisition might steer developers toward exclusively using Nvidia’s own computing hardware.

“Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem,” Huang said. “Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”

Nvidia’s SEC filing echoed that commitment in more formal terms, stating that the company has committed to keep Hugging Face’s platform open, “consistent with Hugging Face’s existing practices,” and that under this commitment, Hugging Face would continue to permit model makers, developers and users to upload and download models and datasets of their choosing, while continuing to support hardware from other silicon vendors beyond Nvidia’s own chips.

Huang also pointed to Nvidia’s existing contributions to the Hugging Face platform as evidence of the company’s long-standing support for open AI development, noting that Nvidia has released more than 500 models and 250 open datasets through the platform, making it the largest single contributor of open models and data to Hugging Face to date.

Nvidia enterprise computing general manager Justin Boitano addressed the strategic rationale behind the deal during a call following the announcement, according to a Yahoo Finance report, indicating the company’s belief in the continued importance of open-model ecosystems to the broader AI industry’s development.

The deal comes roughly a year after Hugging Face turned down an earlier acquisition offer from Nvidia, reportedly worth around $500 million, in order to maintain its independence as a standalone company, according to reporting from the Financial Times. Hugging Face had more recently been generating approximately $150 million in annualized revenue, according to a report from The Information published last month, with company co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue telling TechCrunch in a July interview that the platform’s growth rate was helping it move “close to profitability” even before the Nvidia deal was finalized.

Huang has been an outspoken proponent of open-weight AI models throughout the past year, including authoring an essay in July advocating for open models as a strategic asset for the United States in its broader AI competition with rivals including China. Huang has argued that widespread global adoption of open-weight models developed and hosted through platforms like Hugging Face strengthens American technological influence over the international AI ecosystem, a position he reiterated in Thursday’s announcement of the Hugging Face deal.

Thursday’s acquisition adds to a series of recent moves by Nvidia to deepen its position across the broader AI technology stack, extending well beyond its core business of designing computing chips. Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia struck a $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside to help develop open AI models. During its most recent earnings call, Nvidia disclosed that it has invested more than $50 billion into various AI infrastructure and ecosystem partnerships. The company has also separately committed to partnering with multiple Wall Street investment firms to deploy more than $500 billion in third-party capital toward the broader buildout of AI infrastructure.

Market reaction to Thursday’s confirmation was modestly positive, with Nvidia shares gaining close to 2% during the first hour of Thursday’s trading session, according to Yahoo Finance. Analyst commentary following the announcement characterized the deal’s price tag as a relatively modest expenditure relative to Nvidia’s overall financial scale. Speaking to Yahoo Finance, one analyst identified as Doran noted that Nvidia’s free cash flow is projected to reach nearly $200 billion for its fiscal year 2027, characterizing the roughly $13 billion purchase price as “not a big bite” relative to the company’s overall balance sheet.

That same analyst suggested the acquisition reflects Nvidia’s effort to diversify its business ahead of an eventual moderation in chip demand growth, even as current demand for Nvidia’s core hardware products remains extremely strong. “Right now, chip … demand is huge, but they are positioning themselves for the day when that will slow down,” the analyst said, adding that such a slowdown “still looks like it’s far in the future. But that will happen at some point.”

The Hugging Face acquisition follows Nvidia’s participation earlier this week at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Huang and other technology leaders addressed broader questions surrounding AI’s economic impact and infrastructure requirements. With the deal now confirmed and expected to close within the first half of 2027, Nvidia’s move to bring one of the AI industry’s most widely used open-source platforms under its ownership marks one of the company’s most significant acquisitions to date, further cementing its expanding influence across both the hardware and software layers of the global AI ecosystem.

Pardon me from again borrowing from my G20 interview with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Yet I really want to repeat my view that the most powerful news story, however unreported, is the emergence of an economic boom that is now cutting across every sector of the landscape.

And here is more of what Mr. Bessent said to me in response to my growthier point of view: “And as you said, the president’s policies have laid the groundwork for this economy. So we have regulatory certainty. The president tasked this administration with cutting the regulatory burden, and that’s part of what we’re talking about here today.”

That’s the important regulatory side of the economic boom. By the way, that includes drill, baby, drill, where we are now producing almost 14 million barrels of oil per day, which is an extraordinary number. Plus, record natural gas and liquefied natural gas exports around the world, where Trumpian policies have made America the energy capital of the globe.

And then there’s a tax policy that the press doesn’t really want to write about. Yet perhaps the single most underrated yet powerful policy, is the permanent restoration of 100 percent bonus depreciation to deduct the full cost of qualifying investments, immediately in year one. Anything, machinery, equipment, restaurants, tech startups; small businesses can deduct even more up front than ever before.

This is an enormous part of the AI boom and the data center construction boom, which like the factories of old, is creating massive new job opportunities in manufacturing for working folks, like carpenters, welders, electricians, and plumbers. And counter to the doomsday crowd, these data centers generate their own electricity, their own water systems, they pay more in taxes, and they allow localities to even cut property taxes along the way. And let’s not forget tax-free tips, tax-free overtime, and roughly $300 billion in individual refunds during the latest tax season.

Just today, we got new numbers on the productivity of nonfinancial companies, which is now running at 3.1 percent annually over the past two years, an unheard of accomplishment. Nothing like it since the 1990s. And the manufacturing indexes from the Institute for Supply Management are up for eight months in a row. While the service indexes are up 15 months in a row.

There is a boom out there, folks, and that’s the story that Secretary Bessent has been telling us. If only the press would listen.

UPDATE From CloudFLare: “Cloudflare is not experiencing any significant service disruptions at this time. Our services are operating normally, and any reporting that deviates from this is incorrect” (11:58 AM Thursday, September 3, 2026 Eastern Time (ET)

Users began reporting access problems tied to Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure and security company that powers a significant portion of the global web, starting around 11:12 a.m. EDT Thursday, according to outage-tracking site Downdetector.

The outage tracker’s official account flagged the surge in user complaints shortly after the reports began, asking affected users how the disruption was impacting them and directing people to its live outage dashboard for further updates. The hashtag “CloudflareDown” began circulating on social media as users compared notes on the issue.

Cloudflare, which provides content delivery, network security and performance services for websites across the internet, has experienced a documented pattern of intermittent issues over the past several days, according to independent status-tracking services. StatusGator’s monitoring data shows Cloudflare’s overall status has registered a “warning” condition, indicating degraded rather than fully unavailable service, continuously across much of the past two weeks, with periods ranging from several hours to nearly a full day at a stretch. That same tracker recorded a brief, fully “down” incident lasting 19 minutes on Sept. 1, along with a separate documented incident early Thursday morning, at 1:55 a.m., described as an “HTTP/3 issue affecting R2 custom domains,” which lasted approximately one minute.

Other independent monitoring services have painted a similarly turbulent picture of Cloudflare’s recent reliability. One tracker, IncidentHub, reported that Cloudflare had recorded 76 separate outages across 49 different components over the trailing 30-day period, with specific services including its R2 object storage product and WARP VPN service flagged as affected in recent status checks, even as other Cloudflare offerings, including its AI Gateway and AI Search products, continued showing as operational.

Because Cloudflare provides infrastructure services to an estimated 20% of websites globally, according to industry estimates, disruptions affecting the company’s network have historically produced outsized, highly visible ripple effects across the broader internet, often taking down or degrading access to major platforms that rely on Cloudflare for content delivery, security filtering or domain name resolution services.

Cloudflare has experienced several major, high-profile outages over the past year that illustrate the scale of disruption the company’s infrastructure problems can cause. In November 2025, a significant outage affecting Cloudflare’s core network took down or degraded access to a wide range of major websites and platforms, including social media platform X, artificial intelligence company OpenAI’s services, and music streaming service Spotify. Cloudflare later published a detailed internal account of that incident, describing the resulting downtime as unacceptable given the company’s central role in the internet’s infrastructure.

“We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general,” Cloudflare wrote in its public postmortem addressing the November incident. “Given Cloudflare’s importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable. That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team.”

Cloudflare’s account of the November outage traced the root cause to a software issue in which the company’s systems began loading an incorrect internal feature file, triggering a spike in server error responses across its network. The company said other systems dependent on its core proxy infrastructure, including its Workers KV data storage product and Cloudflare Access authentication service, were also affected during that incident, with engineers ultimately implementing a patch to bypass the core proxy for Workers KV in order to reduce the broader impact.

Just weeks later, in December 2025, Cloudflare experienced another significant disruption, which the company again publicly acknowledged with a similarly apologetic tone in its subsequent incident report.

“Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the Internet down again following the incident on November 18,” Cloudflare wrote regarding the December incident, which the company traced to changes made to its Web Application Firewall buffer size settings as part of an unrelated security effort to protect customers from a critical vulnerability affecting React-based applications.

A separate major incident in February 2026 affected customers using Cloudflare’s Bring Your Own IP service, a feature that allows customers to route their own internet address blocks through Cloudflare’s network. During that incident, a configuration change unintentionally caused a portion of customer IP address routes to be withdrawn from the internet’s global routing tables, rendering affected customer websites and applications unreachable for several hours. Cloudflare said that incident was not caused by any cyberattack or malicious activity, but rather stemmed from an internal change to how the company managed IP addresses onboarded through its Bring Your Own IP pipeline.

As of Thursday morning, it remained unclear whether the reports beginning at 11:12 a.m. EDT were connected to any of the previously logged incidents affecting Cloudflare’s infrastructure this week, or represented a separate, newly emerging disruption. Cloudflare had not issued a specific public statement addressing the cause of Thursday’s reported access issues as of the time affected users began flagging problems on social media.

For website owners and businesses that rely on Cloudflare for their online infrastructure, standard guidance during a suspected outage typically involves first confirming whether the underlying issue originates with Cloudflare itself or with a customer’s own origin server, by checking Cloudflare’s official status page for any acknowledged incidents. If Cloudflare’s status page shows all systems operational despite continued site inaccessibility, the underlying problem more likely lies with a customer’s own hosting provider rather than with Cloudflare’s network directly. In situations where Cloudflare’s infrastructure is confirmed to be the source of a disruption, affected website operators can sometimes mitigate the impact by temporarily enabling Development Mode within their Cloudflare dashboard or by pausing Cloudflare services entirely, routing traffic directly to their origin servers instead.

As of Thursday late morning, it remained unclear how long the newly reported access issues would persist or how broadly they might affect websites and services relying on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. Affected users were advised to monitor both Downdetector’s live outage dashboard and Cloudflare’s official status page for updates as the company worked to identify and address the underlying cause of the disruption.