Downtime

Recent Posts

  • It is time to trade

    Ryan Priest 11 Mar 2020
  • The Advertising Standards Authority has scorned Spotify for letting an It Chapter Two advert crop up in a classical lullaby playlist. Restful tots kicking back to Erik Satie would have been ...

  • The Singer stitch-up

    Ryan Priest 05 Mar 2020
  • Jack Dorsey faces a battle to remain Twitter CEO, as the ruthless activist fund that just bought a 4% stake in the company continues to push hard to get rid of him. Elliott Management, headed by ...

  • Holmes under the hammer

    Ryan Priest 26 Feb 2020
  • IR35 has claimed its first big name, after Eamonn Holmes failed to convince the courts he’s a freelancer in his case against HMRC. For the humble freelancer, the introduction of the kaleidoscopic ...

  • In a world where you can be anything, be kind

    Ryan Priest 20 Feb 2020
  • Ricky Gervais often compares social media abuse to a “tramp” shouting at you from a bin. The only problem with that is, when you lift the tin lid on that swirling vortex of cyber vitriol, rising ...

  • CamSoda-19

    Ryan Priest 13 Feb 2020
  • In what must be one of the most inappropriate gestures in the history of human life, adult website CamSoda has offered free webcam sessions to the 3,600-plus passengers currently quarantined aboard ...

  • Don’t doubt ur vibe

    Ryan Priest 05 Feb 2020
  • You can’t take your eyes off Elon Musk for a moment. Such is the rate of Downtime content generated by tech’s OG attention seeker, we once attempted to retire from indulging his antics altogether. ...

  • Techxit Britain

    Ryan Priest 29 Jan 2020
  • BT’s press office has reported some “worrying” findings as part of its Skills for Tomorrow programme, designed to “close the digital skills knowledge gap that exists between parents and children”. ...

  • Mr Shithole

    Ryan Priest 23 Jan 2020
  • Facebook has extended its apologies to China’s president Xi Jinping for erroneously translating his name to “Mr Shithole”. With Slick Nick busy defending his employer’s decision to keep letting ...

  • Get Huawei done

    Ryan Priest 16 Jan 2020
  • The BBC’s Dan Walker has sat down with Boris Johnson to probe him over all manner of hot topics, including the government’s decision to let Huawei build its 5G telecoms infrastructure. Having ...

  • Reinventing the ball

    Ryan Priest 08 Jan 2020
  • Samsung may have rattled through a number of new technologies in its CES 2020 keynote, but Ballie quite simply stole the show. The very next day, Downtime interviewed several etymologists to try to ...

  • Y2.02K

    Ryan Priest 03 Jan 2020
  • So here we are in 2020, and almost everything is still working as normal. The apocalyptic Y2K bug that caused such a thrill 20 years ago found its sequel in Y2.02K, but rather than nuclear reactor ...

  • Not 4 sale

    Ryan Priest 11 Dec 2019
  • The man behind State Snaps, a set of social media pages with over a million followers, has been sentenced to 14 years in prison for getting his cousin to try to steal a domain name at gunpoint. In ...

  • Walking on the water

    Ryan Priest 04 Dec 2019
  • There wasn’t much fanfare around Amazon Prime’s midweek maiden voyage into Premier League football coverage. We’d have missed the delectable choice of fixtures altogether had we not opened the app ...

  • Keep on truckin’

    Ryan Priest 28 Nov 2019
  • Elon Musk has explained why the windows of Tesla’s tank-like Cybertruck smashed during a humiliating launch. Chief designer Franz von Holzhausen cut a gleeful figure as he prepared to throw a steel ...

  • (What’s the story) morphing Tory?

    Ryan Priest 20 Nov 2019
  • “You dressed up party lines as a fact-check service. That is dystopian,” Emily Maitlis told Conservative Party chairman James Cleverly on the BBC’s Newsnight after the leadership debate. But like a ...