NEW YORK — Meta Platforms Inc. shares rose nearly 2% on Friday to $548.78, gaining $9.74, as the stock found some footing a day after plunging on second-quarter results that highlighted the heavy financial toll of the company’s aggressive artificial intelligence investments.

The rebound came after Meta reported strong advertising revenue growth but a sharp contraction in free cash flow and a profit miss driven by elevated expenses. Investors had sent the shares down roughly 8% on Thursday following the release, reflecting ongoing concerns about the pace of capital spending required to support Meta’s AI ambitions even as its core advertising business continues to expand.

Meta reported revenue of $60.8 billion for the quarter ended June 30, an increase of 28% from $47.5 billion a year earlier and above analysts’ consensus estimates near $60.2 billion. Advertising revenue, which accounts for the vast majority of sales, rose 27% to $59.4 billion. Ad impressions delivered across Meta’s Family of Apps increased 14% year over year, while the average price per ad rose 12%.

Family daily active people reached 3.60 billion on average in June, up 3% from a year earlier. Family of Apps other revenue, which includes WhatsApp paid messaging and subscriptions, jumped 73% to $1.0 billion, crossing the $1 billion mark for the first time in a quarter. Reality Labs revenue was $431 million, up 16%, driven by growth in AI glasses sales that partially offset lower Meta Quest headset volumes.

Despite the top-line strength, net income fell 14% to $15.8 billion, or $6.18 per diluted share, missing Wall Street expectations that clustered around $7.14 to $7.22. Operating income declined 8% to $18.8 billion, and the operating margin contracted to 31% from 43% a year earlier.

Total costs and expenses surged 55% to $42.0 billion. The increase included $2.4 billion in charges related to legal proceedings and $1.18 billion in severance expenses tied to a May headcount reduction of roughly 8,000 employees as the company shifted resources toward AI priorities. Research and development expenses rose sharply. Excluding the legal and severance items, operating income would have increased 9% year over year, according to Chief Financial Officer Susan Li.

Capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, reached $31.1 billion in the quarter. Free cash flow fell to $784 million from $8.55 billion a year earlier, a 91% decline, as the company poured money into data centers and computing infrastructure.

“AI is accelerating our core business today, powering our next generation of products, and opening the door to entirely new enterprise opportunities,” Meta founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in the company’s statement. “The results are already showing, and I’m optimistic about the potential ahead.”

On the earnings call, Zuckerberg and Li emphasized that AI investments are already delivering measurable gains in the advertising business through improved recommendations, ranking and ad targeting. Li noted that large language models are contributing to more precise ad matching, with management citing an 8.3% increase in ad clicks and a 15.7% uplift in conversions on Facebook in certain measurements.

Meta raised the lower end of its full-year 2026 capital expenditure outlook to a range of $130 billion to $145 billion from a prior range of $125 billion to $145 billion. The company said it remains focused on maximizing capacity through 2026 and 2027 while preserving flexibility for decisions further out. Li said Meta is currently demand-constrained on compute and expects that dynamic to continue for the foreseeable future, with numerous high-return opportunities for additional capacity.

For the third quarter, Meta guided total revenue to a range of $61 billion to $64 billion, assuming an approximately 1% headwind from foreign currency. The midpoint of that range came in below some analyst forecasts. Full-year 2026 total expenses are now expected between $165 billion and $169 billion, reflecting the second-quarter legal charges. The company continues to expect full-year operating income to exceed the 2025 level.

Reality Labs posted an operating loss of about $4.6 billion in the quarter. Cumulative losses in the segment have exceeded $80 billion as Meta continues to invest in virtual and augmented reality hardware and software alongside its AI efforts.

Cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities stood at $90.3 billion at quarter-end. Long-term debt rose to $83.7 billion. Meta also flagged ongoing legal and regulatory risks, including youth-related matters and scheduled U.S. trials that could result in material losses.

The results arrived as investors across the technology sector closely scrutinize the returns on massive AI infrastructure spending by the largest companies. While peers with substantial cloud businesses have been able to point to accelerating high-margin revenue growth tied to those investments, Meta’s spending is primarily directed at enhancing its advertising engine, developing personal AI agents and exploring enterprise opportunities, including potential compute services for large customers.

Shares had closed at $539.03 on Thursday after the initial sell-off. The Friday advance partially recovered some of those losses amid broader market gains and a more measured assessment of the underlying advertising trends. Meta’s stock has been under pressure for much of the year amid the elevated capital intensity of its AI strategy.

Analysts and investors continue to weigh the near-term pressure on margins and cash flow against the longer-term potential of AI-driven engagement and monetization improvements across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and emerging products. The company has argued that the investments are already producing visible benefits in user engagement and advertiser performance, even as the full payoff from new AI products and enterprise offerings remains further in the future.

Meta’s performance underscores the divergent paths Big Tech companies are taking in the AI build-out. For the social media giant, the core advertising business remains robust and is benefiting from AI enhancements, yet the scale of infrastructure spending required to stay competitive is compressing free cash flow and testing investor patience on the timeline for broader returns.

Ticketmaster users encountered blank pages and errors while trying to access tickets and log into their accounts Friday, according to outage-tracking service StatusGator, which detected the disruption beginning at 5:31 p.m. Eastern time.

The incident, described by StatusGator as involving “blank page and errors when accessing tickets or logging in,” had not been officially acknowledged by Ticketmaster as of the most recent available information. That pattern of unacknowledged disruptions has become a recurring feature of the platform’s recent history, with StatusGator’s tracking data showing a series of similar incidents over the past month alone, including a brief outage on July 25 involving events and the main site failing to load, a blocked ticket queue on July 9 tied to detection errors, and a longer, roughly two-hour disruption on July 3 in which the website failed to load properly or became stuck on the login page.

Not every monitoring service detected an issue at the same moment. A separate automated check performed by UptimeRobot around the same general timeframe reported no unusual response times or error codes from Ticketmaster’s main website, illustrating how outage reports for the platform can vary depending on which specific monitoring tool or methodology is used, and underscoring that a disruption affecting some users or specific site functions, such as login or account access, does not always register as a full site-wide outage on every tracking service simultaneously.

Ticketmaster does not maintain a publicly accessible status page that outside outage trackers can directly monitor, according to reporting from Tom’s Guide on a previous incident involving the platform, a gap that has repeatedly left users and journalists relying on aggregated, self-reported complaints from services like Downdetector, StatusGator and UptimeRobot rather than official confirmation directly from the company when access problems arise.

Friday’s reported issues add to a long and well-documented history of technical disruptions affecting Ticketmaster, a platform that serves as the primary ticket sales and distribution company for concerts, sporting events and other live entertainment across much of the United States. The company has faced particularly severe and high-profile outages during periods of extremely high demand tied to individual on-sale events. During the presale for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in 2022, outage reports on Downdetector surged to nearly 4,000 as the platform buckled under demand, with both the website and app displaying error messages acknowledging technical difficulties. A message on the app at the time read, “We apologize for the interruption. We are currently experiencing technical difficulties and our team is working to resolve this as soon as possible,” while the website separately displayed a message stating, “Something went wrong on our end and we need to start over.”

Unlike some of those past high-demand incidents, there was no indication that Friday’s reported disruption was tied to a specific major on-sale event driving an unusual surge in simultaneous traffic to the site. Users submitting reports through various tracking platforms described a range of specific problems, including difficulty logging in, blank or unresponsive pages, and errors when attempting to access previously purchased tickets, complaints broadly consistent with the pattern StatusGator flagged for Friday’s incident specifically.

Longstanding user complaints submitted to outage-tracking platforms have also pointed to more persistent, lower-grade technical issues affecting the platform outside of acute outage events, including delays receiving password reset codes via email and website sessions timing out before users can complete a ticket purchase. One user complaint cited by UpDownRadar described password reset codes arriving 10 to 20 hours after being requested, well past their expiration window, while another described the site allowing only 38 seconds to complete a purchase before timing out.

For users experiencing access problems with Ticketmaster, common troubleshooting steps recommended by outage-monitoring services include attempting to access the site from a different browser, device or network, such as a mobile hotspot, disabling any active virtual private network connection, clearing the device’s DNS cache, and restarting the home router. If the platform loads successfully through an alternate connection or device, the underlying issue is more likely tied to a local network problem rather than a broader Ticketmaster outage. If problems persist across multiple devices and networks, however, that pattern is generally considered stronger evidence of a genuine service-side disruption affecting the platform more broadly.

Ticketmaster, owned by parent company Live Nation Entertainment, remains the dominant ticket sales platform for major concert tours, professional sports events and other large-scale live entertainment in the United States, a market position that has drawn regulatory scrutiny in recent years alongside the recurring technical complaints from consumers. The scale of the company’s market share means that even relatively brief or localized technical disruptions can affect a large number of prospective ticket buyers simultaneously, particularly for popular events where demand for available tickets already exceeds supply.

As of the most recent available information, Ticketmaster had not issued a public statement addressing Friday’s reported access issues, and no official timeline had been provided for resolving the problems described by affected users. Anyone continuing to experience login or access problems is encouraged to monitor Ticketmaster’s official social media channels for updates, given the absence of a dedicated public status page, while recognizing that third-party outage trackers, though useful for gauging the general scale of user complaints in near real time, cannot independently confirm the underlying cause or expected resolution timeline for a suspected disruption.

The firm is said to have faced liquidity pressures

Administrators at Leeds-based Torsion Construction Limited say the majority of its 115-strong team have been made redundant.

Specialists from Interpath were appointed to the £165m turnover firm this week. Joint administrators James Clark and Howard Smith said the residential builder had been experiencing liquidity pressures as it tackled delayed capital events, contract margin pressure, and rising input costs, and a wider downturn in the market.

Directors of the business are said to have sought additional funding but were unsuccessful. Given its financial position, Torsion ceased to trade upon appointment. A small number of staff have been retained to assist the Joint Administrators in their duties as they wind down the business.

James Clark, managing director at Interpath and Joint Administrator of Torsion Construction Limited, said: “Torsion Construction has faced many of the immense challenges that have confronted leadership teams right across the sector. Despite its efforts to find a sustainable solution and protect its clients from those pressures, the business’ liquidity ran out of road. With regret, Torsion Construction could not continue in its current form and was left with no other option but to cease trading. We have a team providing the appropriate information and support to staff as we work through an orderly wind down of operations.”

Most recent accounts for Torsion, covering the year to the end of June 2025, show turnover of more than £165m and operating profit of £1.09m. The business covered work across the North and the Midlands.

Directors had talked of growth in line with a three-year plan focussed around purpose-built student accommodation and residential-led developments. Other Torsion-linked businesses including Torsion Care, Torsion Projects, Torsion Homes and Torsion Developments, are reported to be operating as normal.

The Cleveland Cavaliers, having missed out on LeBron James in free agency this summer, are being predicted to shift their attention toward acquiring Houston Rockets star Kevin Durant as a way to bolster their veteran scoring options ahead of the coming season.

James, who is set to turn 42 before the end of the calendar year, ultimately chose to sign with the Philadelphia 76ers rather than return to Cleveland for what would have marked a second homecoming for the four-time NBA champion. That decision left the Cavaliers, coming off a conference finals appearance last season, needing to look elsewhere for a veteran presence capable of adding scoring punch to their existing core.

Sports Illustrated’s Nick Pedone identified Durant as one of the more realistic remaining options for teams still looking to make a significant addition this offseason. “Durant is probably the last one remaining this offseason now that LeBron is in Philadelphia with Jaylen Brown and the Toronto Raptors will eventually finalize their blockbuster deal for Kawhi Leonard,” Pedone wrote.

Unlike James, Durant is not a free agent, meaning any acquisition would require the Cavaliers to construct a trade package significant enough to convince the Rockets to move him. Durant’s name has surfaced repeatedly in trade speculation throughout the offseason, though that recurring speculation does not necessarily indicate Houston is actively shopping him, only that the team has signaled he is not entirely untouchable given the right offer.

Durant, who turns 38 in September, remains under contract with the Rockets through the 2027-28 season after signing a two-year, $90 million extension before joining Houston last summer. His salary cap hit for the 2026-27 season sits at approximately $43.9 million, a substantial but manageable figure for a contending team pursuing a proven scoring addition. Pedone noted that acquiring Durant would still require Cleveland to part with a significant trade package, though nothing approaching the scale of the package Houston originally surrendered to acquire him the previous offseason. “It would take a big package, as Durant remains one of the league’s purest scorers,” Pedone wrote. “But it’s the lone remaining move that would significantly improve Cleveland’s title odds next season.”

The Cavaliers’ roster already includes several significant financial commitments that would factor into any Durant pursuit. Guard Donovan Mitchell recently agreed to a new four-year contract extension in early July, while the team is separately engaged in ongoing multi-year contract discussions with guard James Harden. Adding Durant’s salary on top of those commitments would likely push Cleveland’s payroll into luxury tax territory, a financial consideration the front office would need to weigh against the on-court benefit of adding a player of Durant’s caliber.

Despite the financial complexity, Pedone argued that a proven scorer like Durant could prove worth the cost, pointing specifically to a weakness that was exposed during Cleveland’s conference finals series last season against the eventual NBA champion New York Knicks. The Cavaliers reached the conference finals but ultimately fell short, with the team’s lack of a dependable veteran scoring option cited as a contributing factor in that series loss.

Durant’s statistical profile from last season underscores why he remains an attractive target despite his age. During the 2025-26 season, Durant played 78 games, averaging 26 points, 5.5 rebounds and 4.8 assists per game, while shooting 52% from the field and 41.3% from beyond the three-point line, numbers that place him among the league’s most efficient high-volume scorers even as he approaches his late 30s.

Durant’s postseason availability has drawn some scrutiny, however. Pedone noted that Durant missed five playoff games last season despite being sidelined for only four games during the regular season, a discrepancy that has raised questions about his durability in high-stakes postseason settings. Pedone suggested that Cleveland’s roster depth would allow the team to manage Durant’s workload more carefully than Houston was able to, potentially mitigating some of that postseason availability concern.

Analysts have also pointed to the surrounding talent already in place in Cleveland as a factor that could make the fit smoother than it was in Houston, where Durant often served as the primary offensive focal point with limited complementary scoring support. Playing alongside Mitchell, Harden and forward Evan Mobley would represent a considerably deeper supporting cast than what Durant had around him with the Rockets last season, a dynamic that became especially apparent during the postseason, when Houston was eliminated in the first round in a series where Durant missed significant playing time.

With James now formally settled in Philadelphia and Kawhi Leonard’s trade to Toronto still pending finalization, Durant has increasingly been framed by analysts as one of the last remaining marquee names still plausibly available via trade this offseason, leaving teams like the Cavaliers to weigh whether the scoring upgrade he would provide justifies both the trade cost and the resulting luxury tax implications as Cleveland looks to build on last season’s conference finals run.

President Donald Trump convened his Cabinet on Friday at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, as the war he launched against Iran continues to expand with no clear resolution in sight, according to reporting from Reuters and NBC News.

The meeting marked the 13th Cabinet gathering of Trump’s second term and his third trip to Camp David since returning to office, a notable departure for a president who has largely avoided the mountaintop retreat in favor of his own golf resorts when not at the White House, according to Reuters. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had told reporters ahead of the gathering that hosting the meeting at Camp David would be “a lot of fun and something different for the cabinet to experience together.” The agenda for the meeting was expected to focus heavily on foreign policy, according to Reuters.

The gathering came at a difficult moment for the administration’s stated goals on Iran. Trump had previously predicted the conflict would conclude within “weeks,” but the war has instead continued expanding without an endgame in sight, according to NBC News. Little progress has been made toward stopping Iran from threatening commercial shipping and slowing traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the critical Persian Gulf waterway through which a significant share of the world’s oil normally flows.

The conflict has continued widening in the days leading up to Friday’s meeting. On Tuesday, the U.S. military intercepted a new round of Iranian ballistic missile attacks in Jordan, ending what had been a brief respite in the fighting, according to NBC News. On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia, which had previously remained reluctant to become directly involved, entered the conflict by conducting airstrikes against Iran-backed militias in Iraq that Riyadh accused of attacking its oil facilities. Saudi Arabia’s defense minister also met privately with Trump around the same time. The following day, the Saudi Ministry of Defense announced it would lead a new multinational coalition aimed at protecting shipping routes in the Red Sea and other regional waterways amid repeated attacks by Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen, adding further pressure on maritime trade even as Iran continues to threaten the Strait of Hormuz separately.

Friday’s Cabinet meeting followed the last such gathering on May 27, during which Trump had asserted that the Strait of Hormuz would soon be “open to everybody” and that gasoline prices would fall sharply, predictions that have not materialized in the months since, according to NBC News. U.S. economic growth has slowed since that earlier meeting, and inflation remains stuck above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target rate, with consumer prices continuing to run elevated. Trump’s approval rating has fallen to a record low of 32%, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll cited by NBC News, adding domestic political pressure to the administration’s efforts to resolve the conflict before its economic ripple effects cause further damage.

The Cabinet meeting came just days after Trump held separate meetings with two other heads of state whose countries are themselves engaged in ongoing conflicts but who now share a common adversary in Iran. Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier in the week, according to NBC News, discussions that occurred against the backdrop of the broader regional instability tied to the widening Iran conflict.

Trump has continued to publicly project confidence about the trajectory of the war even as the underlying military and diplomatic situation has grown more complicated. During an earlier Cabinet meeting in March, held shortly after the U.S. and Israel first began attacking Iran on Feb. 28, Trump suggested online and during the meeting itself that Iran had been “obliterated,” that its leaders were “begging” for a deal, and that a resolution was near, according to the Los Angeles Times. Those characterizations have not translated into a concluded conflict in the months since, with fighting instead continuing to spread to additional countries and threaten broader regional shipping and energy infrastructure.

Renewed strikes between the United States and Iran resumed earlier in the week following a brief pause, adding further urgency to Friday’s Cabinet discussions. The renewed hostilities have continued to affect global oil markets, even as prices have shown volatility tied both to the conflict itself and to broader questions about the durability of shipping disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.

With the war continuing to widen rather than resolve, and with domestic economic pressures mounting ahead of the November midterm elections, Friday’s Camp David gathering placed Trump and his top advisers under significant pressure to identify a viable path toward ending the conflict, particularly given the growing involvement of additional regional powers, including Saudi Arabia, and the continued absence of progress toward securing safe passage through the region’s most critical shipping corridors.

Chancellor John Healey has announced the date of his first Budget will be Wednesday, 28 October.

In a video message,  he said: “This will be a Budget that moves money and power out of Westminster, and into every postcode around Britain.

“It will be built on fiscal discipline. It will meet our fiscal rules. It’ll give businesses and families some of the stability they need to plan for the future. Now, let’s get on with the job.”

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said his government will stick to Labour’s fiscal rules on spending and borrowing as well as the party’s 2024 manifesto pledges not to increase income tax, VAT or national insurance contributions.

Burnham also said he will honour the fiscal rules imposed by Healey’s predecessor Rachel Reeves, which include a pledge to balance day-to-day spending with tax revenues by the end of the decade.

An influential think tank said earlier this week that the prime minister only has a small margin of error to do this, and that Healey may have to cut spending or raise taxes to meet Burnham’s policy priorities such as such as extra defence spending and better social care.

Healey was Defence Secretary under Keir Starmer, but resigned after a row over defence spending commitments – saying he was “certain” that Britain shouldl lift its spending to 3% by 2030.

But questioned about funding on Thursday, Burnham’s Defence Secretary Wes Streeting repeatedly refused to commit to that target.

“Before we set out specific spending commitments, we will also set out how we pay for them at the same time,” he said.