Business
Games such as Omaze and McDonald’s Monopoly ‘normalising gambling’, says charity
Prize draws such as Omaze and McDonald’s Monopoly are normalising gambling, particularly for children and young people, a charity has warned.
GambleAware said survey findings suggested a link between prize draws such as Omaze and McDonald’s Monopoly and gambling harm, with latest data suggesting that 27% of people who gamble are estimated to be experiencing a risk of problems from taking part in such games.
Prize draws are not currently regulated as a licensed form of gambling, but GambleAware said they had “many similarities” to certain types of gambling and people “may not understand the risks associated with them”.
The charity raised its concerns about prize draws as it released its fifth annual Treatment and Support Survey data, finding that demand for treatment and support for gambling problems has almost doubled since 2020.
The YouGov survey found that almost one in three adults (30%) who are experiencing a risk of problems from gambling want treatment, support or advice, compared with around one in five (17%) in 2020.
The data also shows an increase in the proportion of adults who are experiencing problem gambling, up from 2.4% in 2020 to 3.8% in 2024.
The number of people affected by family or friend’s gambling has increased from 6.5% in 2020 to 8.1% in 2024 – an estimated 4.3 million adults.
The charity said estimates based on the YouGov survey suggested that around two million children may be living in households with an adult experiencing problem gambling.
GambleAware chief executive Zoe Osmond said: “Gambling can be highly addictive, with devastating impacts on people’s lives, relationships and financial stability.
“While it is encouraging that more people have sought help, this rise may also point to a growing public health crisis.
“We are increasingly alarmed by how gambling is being normalised and how frequently people – especially young people – are exposed to gambling across Great Britain.
“To reverse this troubling trend, urgent preventative action is needed. This must include tougher regulation of gambling advertising to stop gambling being portrayed as ‘harmless fun’.
“There should also be mandatory health warnings on all gambling ads, stricter controls on digital and social media marketing, and a full ban on gambling promotion in stadiums and sports venues to protect children and young people from harm.”
The report, which also explored attitudes towards children’s exposure to gambling, found widespread support for more restrictions on gambling advertising, with 91% supporting a ban on gambling advertising on TV and video games and 90% supporting a ban on social media.
Kate Gosschalk, YouGov associate director, said: “We are pleased to share the findings from the latest annual Treatment and Support Survey, a substantial online survey of around 18,000 people in addition to interviews with those who gamble.
“The new data provides valuable insight about gambling harm, including an increase in the number of people seeking support or treatment over the past five years.”
An Omaze spokesman said: “Omaze takes consumer safeguarding very seriously. We voluntarily operate an automated monthly spending limit for all customers, and our teams proactively review customer spend patterns to identify whether a customer has multiple subscriptions or if they frequently get close to the cap. This allows us to identify and protect against any potential excessive spend.
“We operate in full compliance with all relevant UK regulations.
“As a part of our commitment to high standards, we are subject to strict requirements under the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) and abide by all of its rules in promoting our products.
“Omaze welcomes the Government’s latest research and plans on the prize draw sector. We are pleased to be working closely with the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to develop a voluntary Code of Conduct for the industry, to ensure that Omaze’s high levels of consumer protections are matched across our industry.”
The titans of the technology sector are ramping up their spending on artificial intelligence, as they rush to reap the benefits of an AI boom that has pushed stocks to record highs.
Earnings reports from Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft on Wednesday reaffirmed the colossal amounts of money these firms are shelling out for everything from data centres to chips, even as questions swirl about returns on the investments.
Meta said its capital expenditures for 2025 will be between $70bn (£53bn) to $72bn, up from an earlier estimate of $66bn to $72bn.
Its spending growth in 2026 is poised to be “notably larger” than this year, the company said. Meta is seeking to compete with companies like OpenAI.
On a call with analysts, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg defended the firm’s investments, saying he saw big opportunities ahead driven by AI, both in terms of new products and for honing its current business selling ads and feeding people content.
“The right thing to do is accelerate this,” he said, adding later: “We are sort of perennially operating the family of apps and ads business in a compute-starved state at this point.”
Google and YouTube owner Alphabet similarly raised its forecast for this year to $91bn to $93bn, up from an earlier outlook of $85bn in the summer, in the latest sign of its increasingly lofty spending goals,
That estimate is nearly double the capital expenditures that the company reported for 2024.
Microsoft’s capital expenditures in the quarter through to 30 September, including on data centres, totalled $34.9bn, the company reported on Wednesday – a larger spending figure than analysts had expected, and up from $24 billion in the previous quarter.
“We continue to increase our investments in AI across both capital and talent to meet the massive opportunity ahead,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said.
Azure, the firm’s cloud computing unit, and Microsoft’s other AI products have a “real-world impact”, Mr Nadella said.
Exuberance among investors about massive AI spending has helped all three tech firms outperform the broader S&P 500 index.
But Wall Street is also focused on whether these firms’ investments are starting to yield tangible returns.
The two things holding up the US economy in the last several months have been consumers and AI-related business investments, said Aditya Bhave, senior US economist at Bank of America.
“To the extent that the latter remains strong, it’s a bullish signal for GDP growth,” he said.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary speaks during a press conference alongside U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, discussing administration plans to lower drug costs, at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., U.S., Oct. 29, 2025.
Annabelle Gordon | Reuters
The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday said it will take steps to speed up the process of developing generic versions of complex biological drugs, in a bid to increase cheaper competition for expensive medicines and lower drug costs for Americans.
It’s the Trump administration’s latest move to rein in high prescription drug costs in the U.S., where medication prices are two-to-three times higher than those in other developed nations.
The move to support the development and approval of so-called biosimilars could be a blow to pharmaceutical companies, whose most profitable products are often biological products that treat serious and chronic diseases. The exact impact will depend on the drugmaker and its products.
In a statement on Wednesday, a Health and Human Services Department spokesperson said the law gives manufacturers 12 years of exclusivity for biologic medicines, which is a “primary determining factor in drug development decision-making.”
“No manufacturer should anticipate a monopoly or anything else beyond what is legally granted,” the spokesperson said.
The FDA’s new reforms “will take the five-to-eight year timeframe to bring a biosimilar to market and cut it in half,” the agency’s Commissioner Marty Makary said during a press conference on Wednesday.
During the event, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the FDA has an “outdated and burdensome approval process that has slowed down the entry of biosimilars.” He said “even when [the drugs] do get approved, current laws often prevent pharmacists or patients from substituting them for patients who would benefit from a more affordable option.”
“That all ends today, a the FDA is taking bold, decisive action to break down these barriers and open the markets for real competition,” Kennedy said.
Biological products are engineered with living cells, which makes manufacturing more complex than for chemically derived drugs. Biologics have a special pathway to FDA approval, and it is harder for generic drug manufacturers to sell cheaper versions due to the high costs of development and difficult regulatory landscape.
Biologic medications make up only 5% of prescriptions in the U.S., but account for 51% of total drug spending as of 2024, according to an FDA release. FDA-approved biosimilars are as safe and effective as their branded counterparts, yet their market share remains below 20%, the agency added. The FDA said it has so far approved 76 biosimilars, making up only a small fraction of approved biologic drugs.
Kennedy said biosimilars, on average, cost half the price of their branded counterparts. Their entry into the market drives down brand-name drug prices by another 25%, which is a “real relief for patients,” he added.
Biosimilar generics saved $20 billion in U.S. health-care costs last year alone, the FDA said.
In a new draft guidance, the FDA proposed major updates to simplify biosimilar studies. For example, the agency recommended that human studies directly comparing the biosimilar to a branded product may not be necessary for drug companies to conduct. That research takes years and costs tens of millions of dollars.
Biosimilars have historically struggled to gain market share from their branded counterparts compared to generic copies of small-molecule drugs, which are often delivered in pill form and can enter cells easily because it has a low molecular weight.
The difference is that many biosimilars aren’t identical copies of branded biologic drugs, while generics are.
In many cases, pharmacists can’t directly substitute a branded biologic for a biosimilar when filling a prescription unless they are classified as “interchangeable” and it is permitted by state law.
But the FDA on Wednesday said it generally recommends against requiring so-called “switching studies,” which determine whether biosimilars have that classification. That step is not required for generic copies of small-molecule drugs.
“These additional studies can slow development and create public confusion about biosimilar safety,” the FDA said in a release.
Imran Rahman-Jones,Technology reporter and
Lily Jamali,North America Technology correspondent
Getty ImagesWebsites for Heathrow, NatWest and Minecraft returned to service late on Wednesday after experiencing problems amid a global Microsoft outage.
Outage tracker Downdetector showed thousands of reports of issues with a number of websites around the world over several hours.
Microsoft said some users of Microsoft 365 saw delays with Outlook among other services, but by 21:00GMT, many websites that went down were once again accessible after the company restored a prior update.
The company’s Azure cloud computing platform, which underpins large parts of the internet, had reported a “degradation of some services” at 16:00 GMT.
It said this was due to “DNS issues” – the same root cause of the huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage last week.
Amazon said AWS was operating normally.
Other sites that were impacted in the UK include supermarket Asda and mobile phone operator O2 – while in the US, people reported issues accessing the websites of coffee chain Starbucks and retailer Kroger.
The M&S website remained unavailable late on Wednesday even after many others returned online.
Microsoft said business Microsoft 365 customers experienced problems.
Some web pages on Microsoft also directed users to an error notifications that read “Uh oh! Something went wrong with the previous request.”
The tech giant resorted to posting updates to a thread on X after some users reported they could not access the service status page.
While NatWest’s website was temporarily impacted, the bank’s mobile banking, web chat, and telephone customer services remained available during the outage.
Meanwhile, business at the Scottish Parliament was suspended because of technical issues with the parliament’s online voting system.
The outage prompted a postponement of debate over land reform legislation that could allow Scotland to intervene in private sales and require large estates to be broken up.
A senior Scottish Parliament source told BBC News they believed the problems were related to the Microsoft outage.
Azure’s crucial role online
Exactly how much of the internet was impacted is unclear, but estimates typically put Microsoft Azure at around 20% of the global cloud market.
The firm said it believed the outage was a result of “an inadvertent configuration change”.
In other words, a behind-the-scenes system was changed, with unintended consequences.
The concentration of cloud services into Microsoft, Amazon and Google means an outage like this “can cripple hundreds, if not thousands of applications and systems,” said Dr Saqib Kakvi, from Royal Holloway University.
“Due to cost of hosting web content, economic forces lead to consolidation of resources into a few very large players, but it is effectively putting all our eggs in one of three baskets.”
Recent outages have laid bare the fragility of the modern-day internet, according to engineering professor Gregory Falco of Cornell University.
“When we think of Azure or AWS, we think of a monolithic piece of technology infrastructure but the reality is that it’s thousands if not tens of thousands of little pieces of a puzzle that are all interwoven together,” said Mr Falco.
He noted that some of those pieces are managed by the companies themselves while others are overseen by third parties such as CrowdStrike, which last year deployed a software update that affected more than eight million computers run on Microsoft systems.
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