The phone was sucked out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 on Friday when a fuselage panel blew off, leaving a gaping hole. The passenger plane made an emergency landing shortly after, with all aboard safe.

A few items, reportedly including AirPods and a boy’s shirt, made more dramatic landings after shooting out of the suddenly depressurized cabin.

Amid a search for debris, a man named Sean Bates in the northwestern state of Washington found an iPhone on the side of the road, appearing to belong to one of the passengers.

A photo of the device posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday showed the intact screen and an emailed $70 baggage receipt. The battery is shown charged to 44 percent and the smartphone remains on flight mode.

Aside from the port, where the terminal of the charger protrudes after being ripped from the rest of the cord, the phone appears untouched.

In a follow up TikTok post, Bates said he’d found the phone “pretty clean, no scratches on it, sitting under a bush.”

Bates said he contacted the National Transportation Safety Board, which told him it was the second phone from the flight to have been found.

NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy replied to his post on X thanking him and offering to meet.

In a briefing on Sunday, Homendy told reporters that “We’ll look through [the phones] and then return them,” adding that it was “very, very fortunate” that the incident had not ended in tragedy.

In response to the incident, regulatory bodies swiftly grounded some versions of Boeing’s 737 MAX 9 jet, pending inspections. Boeing shares plunged in trading on Monday.

The post iPhone survives 16,000-foot fall from Alaska Airlines flight appeared first on Digital Journal.

The mystery glitch crashed electronic payment systems, disrupted phone lines used by ambulances and police, and briefly halted rush-hour trains in the southern city of Melbourne.

Optus, a subsidiary of Singapore telecommunications company Singtel, said it had restored services on Wednesday evening — but it was unable to pinpoint what had caused the fault. 

A “technical network outage” detected at about 4:05 am Sydney time had cut off customers, Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin told national broadcaster ABC.

“We  are very sorry that this occurred and I am happy to say that services are now restored again,” she said.

“Until we have done a full, thorough root cause analysis we really can’t provide more information,” she said, describing the outage as a “very rare occurrence”.

The Optus boss said there was “no indication” the issues were the result of hacking.

Just over a year ago, more than nine million Optus customers had their personal data stolen in a cyber attack.

A host of organisations and businesses confirmed their connections had been restored, including the federal department of education, the Royal Melbourne Hospital, and Australia’s Commonwealth Bank.

Optus, Australia’s second-largest telecoms firm with more than 10 million customers, had struggled through the day to bring its systems back up.

– ‘Absolute disgrace’ –

Dozens of hospitals were unable to receive phone calls during the outage and landline phones on the Optus network could not ring emergency services.

The poisons hotline in New South Wales state also said it was impacted.

And there was morning rush-hour chaos in Melbourne after what officials described as a “communications outage” disrupted train services.

Australian Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the Optus outage had been caused by a “deep fault” in a “fundamental” part of the company’s network. 

“What we do know is that this is a deep fault. It has occurred deep within the network,” she told reporters.

“It has wide ramifications across mobile, fixed, and broadband services for Optus customers.

“Customers are clearly frustrated about it, and Optus should respond to that accordingly.”

Australia’s Communication Workers Union said the outage was an “absolute disgrace”, linking it to recent job losses at the company.

– ‘Borrow a phone’ –

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology researcher Mark Gregory said the disruptions showed there were fundamental problems in Australia’s communications networks.

“Single point of failure related outages have occurred too often over the past decades and it is time that the government steps in to force the telecommunications industry to build redundancy into the networks and systems,” he said.

Ramsay Health Care said on Facebook that the outage took down phones at its 73 private hospitals and day surgery units, while Sydney’s Westmead Private Hospital also said its phone lines were affected.

A carer said he had not been able to call an ambulance for one of his patients, telling ABC Radio Melbourne: “I had to run out on the street and borrow a phone from someone walking his dog.”

The post Telecoms outage cuts off millions of Australians appeared first on Digital Journal.

Mike Reazin, Senior Director at ISN, believes telecom companies need to do their due diligence across the supply chain to manage security risks as well as ensure contractors and suppliers are aware of the specific cybersecurity risks that each job site poses. He outlines the approach to Digital Journal.

Digital Journal: What specific risks make telecom providers more vulnerable to attacks?

Mike Reazin: Telecom companies are a primary target for bad actors due to the compelling nature of their data and wide attack surface. An attacker who can successfully get a foothold in a telecom provider’s infrastructure could conduct surveillance on sensitive customer information.

This doesn’t necessarily mean telecom providers are more vulnerable, but the combination of these factors causes attackers to intentionally target these companies frequently and with more resources. An attacker exploiting a vulnerability in a telecom’s infrastructure can lead to widespread disruption, such as when tens of thousands of customers lost service when Viasat was attacked in February of 2022. 

DJ: How can telecom companies best ensure cyber due diligence and manage risk across the supply chain?

Reazin: The best recommendation for telecom companies happens to be the best practice for any organization. That is to standardize a tiered, third-party risk management program across all supply chain participants that pose a cybersecurity risk to the organization.

This is done by establishing a baseline of cybersecurity due diligence, then increasing that level of review as suppliers become higher risk. It’s important to note that a company must ensure that adequate resources are allocated to cybersecurity to ensure proper implementation of this program. For more information, this blog on Supply Chain Cybersecurity Risk discusses best practices and suggestions to help mitigate cybersecurity risk in supply chains. 

DJ: What are the best ways that telecom companies can make contractors and suppliers aware of the cybersecurity risks involved on a job site?

Reazin: The best strategy is creating a cybersecurity awareness program that enforces consistent training in security policies, best practices and common threats. The most advanced programs are tailored to the specific responsibilities and roles of the company’s contractors and suppliers. Data from Verizon indicates that 74% of all breaches include the human element. The more companies can establish clear security policies and procedures on their sites, the more they can lower their cybersecurity risk.

Creating scorecards with cybersecurity requirements for specific sites allows companies to fine-tune requirements for groups of contractors and suppliers that have varying levels of due diligence needs. It is important to couple cybersecurity training with other risk management strategies. Some risk management programs offer complementary cybersecurity training that helps protect contractors and suppliers from cyber threats.

The post Q&A: Making the telecoms sector more secure against cyber-threats appeared first on Digital Journal.

The idea is not new but has ignited a fierce debate.

Telecoms giants say that they need more money to maintain and update the infrastructure to meet Europe’s voracious data needs, and that it would be fairer if firms like Netflix contributed towards the cost.

But tech behemoths say telecoms companies already get money from customers, while digital rights activists fear making web giants pay would create a two-speed internet.

“Big tech companies pay today almost nothing for data transport in our networks, far from covering the costs needed to expand networks,” a letter published by the European telecoms lobby group ETNO and signed by 20 CEOs said.

“A fair and proportionate contribution from the largest traffic generators towards the costs of network infrastructure should form the basis of a new approach,” they said.

ETNO has previously named Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Netflix as the major culprits.

The CEOs said the European Union estimated that at least 174 billion euros ($183 billion) of new investment is needed by 2030 to meet connectivity targets.

“The telecoms sector is currently not strong enough to meet that demand,” said the CEOs, including Orange’s Christel Heydemann and Telefonica’s Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete.

The European Commission launched a public consultation in February, inviting citizens, non-governmental organisations and companies to make their submissions by May.

The EU’s executive arm is expected to make the results public before the end of 2023.

The idea of “fair contribution to telecommunication networks” is also divisive within the EU.

While earlier this year the European Parliament voiced support for the measure, not all of the EU’s 27 member states are on board.

Many countries reportedly opposed such a levy on tech firms in June.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), one of the main tech lobbying groups, has repeatedly argued against the measure, warning that fees would have disastrous consequences for European consumers.

One of their main arguments is that customers would be forced to pay twice, first for the internet access, and second through higher costs for streaming and cloud services.

Last year, 34 civil society organisations wrote in an open letter that any levy would go against Europe’s rules on net neutrality, whereby telecoms firms are barred from selling faster internet speeds to particular companies.

The post European telecom firms urge EU to make big tech pay appeared first on Digital Journal.

SoftBank, a Japanese investment holding company, is counting on the reputation of Arm, a leading microprocessor designer whose products are used in 99 percent of the world’s smartphones.

Through an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of some 10 percent of the capital of the jewel of British technology, SoftBank hopes to raise between $4.5 billion and $5.2 billion, valuing the company at up to $52 billion. 

That is considerably more than the $32 billion the Japanese multinational spent in July 2016 to take control of Arm, but also substantially less than the $60 billion to $70 billion that SoftBank was hoping for even a few weeks ago, according to several reports.

The stakes are high for the company founded by Masayoshi Son, whose record in tech investments in recent years has been mixed at best.

SoftBank suffered enormous losses over its investments in shared office space provider WeWork and China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba.

– ‘A very long desert’ –

“Nobody disputes that this is a quality company that has substantial sales, substantial profits…” said Jay Ritter, a professor specializing in stock launches at the University of Florida. “The question is about future growth potential.”

He added: “There doesn’t seem to be a lot of enthusiasm among institutional investors for a $50 billion valuation.”

Some analysts have pointed out that Arm designs microprocessors, or CPUs, while the revolution in generative artificial intelligence relies on more powerful GPUs, or graphics processing units. 

The IPO also poses a large-as-life test for the capital markets, which have not seen a stock introduction of similar magnitude since that of American e-vehicle maker Rivian, valued at $77 billion in November 2021.

“To say it’s eagerly anticipated would be an understatement,” said Mark Roberts, managing director of San Francisco-based Blueshirt Capital Advisors. 

After what he called “a very long desert of new issue,” Roberts said he expects Arm is “really going to emerge as a bellwether technology stock.”

In the 18 months from January 2022 through June 2023, just $18.7 billion was raised in US stock offerings, compared to $155.8 billion in the single year of 2021, according to EY Capital Advisors.

The last time numbers as small as 2022’s were seen was in 1990.

– ‘A good harbinger’ –

Roberts pointed out that 27 banks are taking part in the IPO.

“So you’ve got a lot of the Wall Street community focused on this deal being done correctly, and well,” particularly since Arm decided to place its bet on Wall Street rather than London.

SoftBank also lined up a prestigious group of clients, from Apple to Nvidia, prepared to invest $735 million in Arm.

“If this deal goes well, that’s a good harbinger for momentum building into a stronger 2024,” Roberts said.

– Gauging appetites –

But another analyst, Avery Spear of Renaissance Capital, said the Arm deal would be just one data point.

“I don’t think that this deal will necessarily tell us too much,” she said. “We’re looking for more deals like Instacart and Klaviyo to provide us maybe more information on what appetite will look like for the majority of companies looking to go public right now.”

Both Instacart, the grocery-delivery company whose formal name is Maplebear, and marketing automation firm Klaviyo, filed in late August for IPOs without setting target dates.

Their valuations are estimated, respectively, at $10 billion and $9.5 billion.

Other companies reportedly considering IPOs are online payments specialist Stripe, sports merchandising giant Fanatics, and online travel platform Navan. 

But the financial environment remains fragile, with the US economy still in a phase of deceleration.

“There are still certainly macro issues that investors are probably keeping their eye on,” said Spear, noting above all the continued interest rate rises decided by the Federal Reserve.

“But I don’t think we are at a point yet, like we were last year,” she added, of a “perfect storm of bad news.”

Most analysts say the Fed’s monetary tightening cycle, meant to rein in high inflation, was near an end — leaving investors breathing a bit more easily.

The post Arm’s listing on NY exchange is a big wager in an uncertain market appeared first on Digital Journal.

Katherine Allen climbs into a white Jaguar, which then pushes out carefully into the traffic in a busy neighborhood crisscrossed by jaywalkers and cyclists.

The 37-year-old lawyer has been voluntarily testing Waymo’s robot cabs since the end of 2021. At first, there was always an employee of this subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) on board, there to grab the wheel if needed.

And then one night with very little warning, the car came to her unchaperoned.

“I was really nervous the first time, but not too nervous that I didn’t want to take it. I was excited too,” she said.

“For the first two thirds of the trip, maybe 20 minutes or so, I was freaking out and then all of a sudden it just sort of felt normal, which is weird, because it wasn’t normal!”

The vehicles in San Francisco are operated by Waymo and General Motors owned Cruise and earlier this summer both operators received permission by a California regulator to operate 24/7 across the city except on freeways.

This made San Francisco the first major city with two fleets of driverless vehicles fully operating that the companies hope will drive their expansion elsewhere across the United States.

– ‘Awesome’ –

On Tuesday evening, accompanied by AFP, Isaac, a San Francisco resident and stay at home Dad, ordered his first ride on Cruise’s app.

“Percussion,” the vehicle’s name, arrived quickly. But instead of taking the direct route, which would have led to a supermarket in less than five minutes, the trip followed a long, unexplained detour.

“It’s odd to me that the steering wheel even turns… It’s kind of ghostly,” Isaac observed as the car pulled away embarking on the journey.

“I’m actually impressed. It’s decent at braking. It’s not all psycho about slamming on the brakes and accelerating really quickly,” said Isaac.

Isaac turned his attention to a quiz on the screen before him.

But he disagreed with the answer about the best burrito in San Francisco. “It’s a good driver but I’m not sure it has good taste in burritos.”

Twenty minutes and a dozen questions later, Percussion finally arrived at its destination, but parked quite far from the store, probably because of the roadworks.

Not that Isaac was discouraged: “It was awesome. I would do it again anytime.” 

“It’s very peaceful. There’s no chatter. There’s not a weird radio station playing random music,” he observed.

And if it was the same price as an Uber “I would go for the robot because I’m kind of antisocial.”

– Road rage free –

Waymo tester Katherine Allen was also sensitive to the social aspect.

“The advantage that they have over human drivers is that they’re cautious, which can be really annoying to other drivers,” she said. 

But “there’s not going to be any road rage” from a robotaxi, she added as her car inched slowly through daytime traffic.

Taking on her role as a tester, Allen gave the emergency “pull over” button a go and the vehicle veered safely to the side as intended.

Resuming the journey proved difficult. Human drivers showed no mercy for a robot wanting to get back in the driving lane.

So far, most incidents have involved vehicles stopped on the road. 

But local authorities have nevertheless asked Cruise to halve its fleet in San Francisco (to 50 cars active during the day and 150 at night), while it investigates two collisions that occurred last week, including one with a fire truck.

Even in this tech-crazed city, robotaxis are a divisive issue.

Environmental activists criticize them for perpetuating the reign of the private car, while associations for the disabled say they are not sufficiently adapted to their needs, and trade unions fear job losses.

But just as many see driverless cars as beneficial to these causes.

And the excitement is there: Waymo says it has more than 100,000 people on its waiting list. 

Allen, who until now had enjoyed her rides for free, will have to pay in the future. Will she continue to use Waymo or go with a human driven Uber? 

“It will depend on price and time… autonomous cars are almost always slower,” she said.

The post From wow to new normal: driverless cars cruise the streets of San Francisco appeared first on Digital Journal.

Swiss-based Drahi, whose Altice group of businesses spans telecoms and media in Europe, Israel and North America, is trying to ease investor concerns weeks after one of his top lieutenants, Armando Pereira, was detained in Portugal.

The authorities there have accused Portuguese billionaire Pereira of 11 offences of corruption and money laundering, with a central allegation that he set up a network of bogus suppliers to embezzle money through Altice’s procurement system.

Pereira, who has no formal post but is widely seen as Drahi’s right-hand man, denies the claims.

But the scandal has spread from Portugal to other parts of Drahi’s empire, with executives in the United States and France being dismissed, suspended or stepping back.

“If these allegations are true, I feel betrayed and deceived by a small group of individuals, including one of our oldest colleagues,” Drahi told investors and analysts during a widely anticipated conference call on Monday.

He said the claims had come as a “shock and a huge disappointment”.

But he insisted that the amounts involved were relatively small, and that the firm was cooperating with law enforcement and had halted trading with any of the companies under investigation in Portugal.

– ‘Very unpleasant’ –

Drahi, who generally keeps a low profile and rarely talks to investors, has amassed a fortune estimated at more than $10 billion, making him France’s 13th richest man, according to French magazine Challenges.

He pieced together a network of companies through leveraged acquisitions and is now a major player in telecoms in France, Israel, Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal and Switzerland.

Drahi, who also owns broadband firm Altice USA and part of Britain’s BT, is known as an art lover and bought Sotheby’s auction house in 2019.

But his investment spree was made possible in large part by borrowing, resulting in a debt pile worth around $60 billion.

With interest rates rising and the corruption scandal making headlines, Drahi chose to make a rare appearance on calls with investors and analysts on Monday and Tuesday.

“It is very unpleasant to see the word ‘corruption’ next to the name of our group,” he said, adding that his company should be regarded as “a victim”.

The post French billionaire Drahi feels ‘betrayed’ as graft claims swirl appeared first on Digital Journal.

Swiss-based Drahi, whose empire spans telecoms and media in Europe, Israel and North America, is expected to try to ease investor concerns weeks after one of his top lieutenants was detained in Portugal.

The authorities there have accused Portuguese billionaire Armando Pereira of 11 offences of corruption and money laundering, with a central allegation that he set up a network of bogus suppliers to embezzle money through Altice’s procurement system.

Pereira denies the claims but the scandal has spread from Portugal to other parts of Drahi’s empire, with executives in the United States and France being dismissed, suspended or stepping back.

Drahi, who generally keeps a low profile, has amassed a fortune estimated at more than $10 billion, making him France’s 13th richest man, according to French magazine Challenge.

He pieced together a network of companies through leveraged acquisitions and is now a major player in telecoms in France, Israel, Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal and Switzerland.

Drahi, who also owns broadband firm Altice USA and part of Britain’s BT, is known as an art lover and bought the auction house Sotheby’s in 2019.

But his investment spree was made possible only by amassing a debt pile worth around $60 billion.

With interest rates rising and the corruption scandal making headlines, Drahi’s calls with investors on Monday and Tuesday will be closely monitored by investors.

– Fundamental questions –

The company has tried to play down the investigation, saying it is cooperating with the authorities and highlighting that several employees have been suspended.

Pereira, despite being widely seen as Drahi’s right-hand man, has no official post at the company.

Arthur Dreyfuss, CEO of Altice France, told a meeting with trade unions on Wednesday that only a handful of the companies named in the Portuguese inquiry had trading relations with Altice.

“At this stage, this represents less than four percent of our annual purchases in terms of volume,” he said.

But Olivier Lelong of the CFDT trade union, who was at Wednesday’s meeting, told AFP that the nature of the allegations suggested fundamental issues with the company.

“On a day-to-day basis, expenses are the most closely monitored thing in the group,” he said.

“It’s on such a scale… that there must have been a problem with the company’s control and governance.”

– Altice is ‘victim’ –

Drahi, 59, was born in the Moroccan city of Casablanca and moved to France at 15, eventually studying at the country’s top engineering school, the Ecole Polytechnique.

After an early career spent working for fibre-optics companies, he set out on his own and bought up several troubled cable and mobile operators, before hitting the big time in 2014 when he took control of SFR, France’s second-biggest mobile operator.

From there he built his vast empire, with unions dubbing him the “cost killer” for his habit of streamlining the firms he bought.

But with the corruption claims and rising interest rates forcing him to renegotiate the terms of his loans, Drahi pis facing one of his biggest challenges to date.

“Patrick Drahi has built his success on access to low-cost debt,” Denis Lafarge, a partner at PMP Strategy, told AFP.

Drahi is known as a smart financial operator and has long relied on selling off infrastructure like telecoms masts and fibre networks to raise cash. 

Lafarge said those options are getting thinner but he still has some sellable assets — the Meo operator in Portugal and some data centres could be sacrificed.

Sylvain Chevallier of the BearingPoint consultancy added that rising inflation meant businesses like Altice will be able to raise prices and raise cash that way.

But the immediate need is for Drahi to stem the damage from the corruption inquiry.

“It’s important for him to speak out,” said Dreyfuss.

“Until we have proof to the contrary, Altice is a victim of all this.”

The post French billionaire Drahi to face investors as graft claims swirl appeared first on Digital Journal.

Zuckerberg’s Meta group, which owns Facebook, has listed a new app in stores as “Threads, an Instagram app”, available for pre-order in the United States, with a message saying it is “expected” this Thursday.

The two men have clashed for years but a recent comment by a Meta executive suggesting that Twitter was not run “sanely” irked Musk, eventually leading to the two men offering each other out for a cage fight.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (L) and Twitter owner Elon Musk recently challenged each other to a cage fight – Copyright AFP/File BEN STANSALL

Since buying Twitter last year for $44 billion, Musk has fired thousands of employees and charged users $8 a month to have a blue checkmark and a “verified” account.

On the weekend, he limited the posts readers could view and decreed that nobody could look at a tweet unless they were logged in, meaning external links no longer work for many.

He said he needed to fire up extra servers just to cope with the demand as artificial intelligence (AI) companies scraped “extreme levels” of data to train their models.

But commentators have poured scorn on that idea and marketing experts say he has massively alienated both his user base and the advertisers he needs to get profits rolling.

In another move that shocked users, Twitter announced Monday that access to TweetDeck, an app that allows users to monitor several accounts at once, would be limited to verified accounts next month.

John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University, told AFP that plenty of people wanted to quit Twitter for ethical reasons after Musk took over, but he had now given them a technical reason to leave too.

And he added that Musk’s decision to sack thousands of workers meant it had long been expected that the site would become “technically unusable”.

– ‘Remarkably bad’ –

Musk has said he wants to make Twitter less reliant on advertising and boost income from subscriptions.

Yet he chose advertising specialist Linda Yaccarino as his chief executive recently, and she has spoken of going into “hand-to-hand combat” to win back advertisers.

“How do you tell Twitter advertisers that your most engaged free users potentially will never see their ads because of data caps on their usage,” tweeted Justin Taylor, a former marketing executive at Twitter.

Mike Proulx, vice president at market research firm Forrester, said the weekend’s chaos had been “remarkably bad” for both users and advertisers.

“Advertisers depend on reach and engagement yet Twitter is currently decimating both,” he told AFP.

He said Twitter had “moved from stable to startup” and Yaccarino, who remained silent over the weekend, would struggle to restore its credibility, leaving the door open to Twitter’s rivals to suck up any cash from advertisers.

– ‘Open secret’ –

The technical reasons Musk gave for limiting the views of users immediately brought a backlash.

Many social media users speculated that Musk had simply failed to pay the bill for his servers.

French social data analyst Florent Lefebvre said AI firms were more likely to train their models on books and media articles than social network content, which “is of much poorer quality, full of mistakes and lacking in context”.

Yoel Roth, who stepped down as Twitter’s head of security weeks after Musk took over, said the idea that data scraping had caused such performance problems that users needed to be forced to log in “doesn’t pass the sniff test”.

“Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access,” he wrote on the Bluesky social network — another Twitter rival.

“We knew about it. It was fine.”

The post Twitter chaos leaves door open for Meta’s rival app appeared first on Digital Journal.

The layoffs, comprising 42 percent of BT’s workforce, come two days after UK mobile phone giant Vodafone unveiled plans to cut 11,000 jobs or one tenth of staff over three years.

“Both have been struggling with the pressures of inflation, most notably from energy,” said Victoria Scholar, an analyst at Interactive Investor.

BT employs 130,000 staff, including contractors.

The group will lower this to between 75,000 and 90,000 people over the next five to seven years, it said in a results statement.

The grim news follows the axing this year of tens of thousands of jobs across the global tech sector, including by Facebook parent Meta, as soaring inflation also saps the world economy.

BT is implementing further cutbacks, having already slashed costs under a plan launched three years ago.

“By the end of the 2020s, BT Group will rely on a much smaller workforce and a significantly reduced cost base,” said chief executive Philip Jansen.

The company was “navigating an extraordinary macro-economic backdrop”, he added.

The slimmed-down group “will be a leaner business with a brighter future” and will “digitise the way we work and simplify our structure”.

BT said that once its full fibre broadband and 5G network was rolled out, it would not need as many staff to build and maintain it.

The firm also revealed Thursday that net profit soared 50 percent to £1.9 billion ($2.4 billion) in its fiscal year to March, but the performance was skewed by a one-off tax credit.

Pre-tax profit sank 12 percent to £1.7 billion from a year earlier, while revenue dipped one percent to £20.7 billion.

– Shares slump –

Investors took flight following news of heavy cutbacks.

BT’s share price sank almost nine percent in early morning deals on the rising London stock market.

It later stood at 138.95 pence, down 6.2 percent from Tuesday’s close.

“Headlines will no doubt focus on the job cuts,” noted Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Matt Britzman.

“It’s drastic, but it’s not overly surprising given the mounting costs and slim margins in the wider business.”

As part of an ongoing overhaul, the firm announced a tie-up last year for its pay-TV channel BT Sport.

BT and Warner Bros. Discovery agreed to combine televised sport offerings in UK and Ireland.

The new joint venture, combining the assets of BT Sport and Eurosport UK, will launch later this year under the banner TNT Sports.

The move will mark the end of the BT Sport brand, which was launched ten years ago and features costly coverage of England’s Premier League football.

“The consolidation has the potential to create synergies,” noted Scholar.

Britzman said BT may be looking to eventually cash out.

“Likely the more important goal will be the slow disposal of the 50-percent stake BT holds in the joint venture; options are in place for Warner Bros to buy portions of BT’s stake over the first four years,” he told AFP.

The post UK telecoms firm BT to axe up to 55,000 jobs by 2030 appeared first on Digital Journal.