Big names, big challenges

As I was trying to get a hold of some tickets to one of the world’s most famous music festivals, the world around me was unraveling in its own chaos – from tech giants battling multi-billion-dollar lawsuits to political turmoil and social media shake-ups.

Filling in for Cybernews chief editor Jurgita Lapienytė this week as she enjoys a little Parisian getaway, it’s your trusted correspondent Justinas Vainilavičius.

I type today’s TL;DR newsletter with trembling fingers in anticipation of what will likely be a bloodbath: my first attempt to purchase tickets for Glastonbury 2025, the iconic five-day festival that’s been rocking the English countryside for the past half of a century.

This is a notoriously difficult task – last year, all 210,000 tickets sold out in just 58 minutes as more than 2.5 million people tried to snatch theirs, according to the BBC, which published a helpful 11-step guide to purchasing tickets just hours before the first batch went on sale.

These are solid instructions, and they’re pretty much what I followed to maximize my luck. The most important thing was to register before the November 11th deadline for a chance to buy tickets – if you missed it, it’s too late now. I also joined what’s known as a “syndicate.”

A syndicate typically involves dozens of people who divide themselves into groups of six, the maximum number of tickets that you can buy after reaching a booking stage if you have each attendee’s registration details. Everyone in the syndicate must try to purchase tickets for everyone else in the group, even after securing theirs.

The rules of my syndicate state that “teamwork, commitment, and trust” are crucial for the system to work, as are weeks of meticulous planning, sorting through Excel spreadsheets, and multiple WhatsApp groups.

I was told my syndicate has never failed before – and as it’s my first time joining, here’s hoping my beginner’s luck will help. And yet, there are a couple of unknowns that may complicate our efforts this year.

First, the demand may be higher than expected as the festival will take a hiatus in 2026. And then there’s a change in the booking system with the introduction of automatic queueing. It means that instead of constantly refreshing the tickets page, people will be assigned a place in a queue randomly. The later you join, the further back in the queue you’ll be placed.

This is slightly concerning as a similar system was used in ticket sales for concerts by the likes of Taylor Swift and Oasis, leading to some not-insignificant hiccups.

Speaking of hiccups, this was, once again, not the best of weeks for big tech. The British consumer rights group Which? filed a £3 billion (that’s $3.8 billion) legal claim against Apple, claiming that the iPhone-maker breached the UK’s competition law by “trapping” millions of customers into its iCloud service at jacked-up prices. Apple, which faces a similar case in the US, said it would “vigorously” defend itself against the claims.

Meanwhile, Meta was hit with another massive fine in the EU, where regulators ruled that it breached the bloc’s antitrust rules by linking Facebook with Marketplace, its online classified ads business.

The €797.72 million ($840 million) fine adds to a string of penalties received by Meta in the EU, primarily over violations of the bloc’s privacy rules. Earlier this year, the company was hit with a record €1.2 billion fine for violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It has incurred over €2.5 billion in fines for GDPR violations since the law came into effect in 2018. Meta expressed its disagreement with the latest EU ruling, saying it “ignores the realities” of the market.

The MOVEit Transfer hack, among the biggest last year, continues to haunt companies, with Amazon the latest to confirm that attackers exposed some of its employees’ data. The actors behind the leak – self-described “hacktivists” – claim they want to ensure data owners take user privacy seriously.

According to security experts, other big names affected by the leak include banking behemoths HSBC, UBS, and City National Bank, tech companies HP and Lenovo, and fast food chain McDonald’s.

With tech billionaire Elon Musk named by President-elect Donald Trump as his new efficiency tsar, millions of federal workers are bracing for the worst as the incoming administration promises “drastic change.”

Leading the way, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), co-managed and funded by NASA and the California Institute of Technology, announced it is laying off 325 employees after already cutting over 500 jobs earlier this year. JPL, known for manufacturing NASA’s Mars rovers, is regarded as essential to the agency’s deep space exploration missions – but perhaps that’s now Musk’s territory.

Musk’s decision to join the Trump administration did not sit well with hundreds of thousands of X users, prompting a fresh exodus from the billionaire’s social network. Bluesky, the decentralized micro-blogging alternative, has emerged as the biggest beneficiary, gaining over 700,000 new users in the first week following the presidential election. The platform now boasts 15 million accounts, up from 10 million in September.

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