LimeWire, the filesharing service that set the internet ablaze in the 2000s before being shut down for copyright infringement, said Tuesday that is acquiring the rights to Fyre Festival.

And it appreciates the irony.

‘LimeWire Acquires Fyre Festival Brand — What Could Possibly Go Wrong?’ the company titled its news release.

LimeWire said it would “unveil a reimagined vision for Fyre — one that expands beyond the digital realm and taps into real-world experiences, community, and surprise.” The company offered no additional details about how the Fyre brand will be relaunched.

For years, LimeWire operated as a competitor to fellow file-sharing platform Napster before being effectively shut down by a court ruling in 2010 after a judge ruled it had facilitated large-scale copyright violations. In 2022, Austrian brothers Julian and Paul Zehetmayr bought LimeWire’s intellectual property and turned it into an NFT service.

Fyre Festival was a 2017 music festival that saw ticket buyers spend thousands of dollars for a weekend in the Bahamas only to be met with a logistics debacle that included portable bathrooms taking the place of regular toilets, and low-budget food options that betrayed promises of celebrity chef fare. Organizer Billy McFarland was later convicted of fraud and sentenced to six years in prison.

“Fyre became a symbol of hype gone wrong, but it also made history,” LimeWire CEO Julian Zehetmayr said. “We’re not bringing the festival back — we’re bringing the brand and the meme back to life. This time with real experiences, and without the cheese sandwiches.”

LimeWire said its bid was backed by Maximum Effort, the creative agency co-founded by the actor and entrepreneur Ryan Reynolds.

“Congrats to LimeWire for their winning bid for Fyre Fest,” Reynolds said in the release. “I look forward to attending their first event but will be bringing my own palette of water.”

Fast-food restaurants are losing breakfast customers to convenience stores.

Morning meal traffic to fast-food chains rose 1% in the three months ended in July, while visits to food-forward convenience stores climbed 9% in the same period, according to market research firm Circana.

“Over the long run, convenience stores have taken share, really at foodservice overall, but the morning meal has been their strong suit,” David Portalatin, Circana senior vice president and foodservice industry advisor, told CNBC, noting the trend has largely been driven by what the group calls “food-forward convenience stores.”

For decades, McDonald’s and its rivals have tried to lure consumers away from home to eat their early morning offerings, betting that convenience and unique items will win over diners.

While fast-food chains have made some inroads, 87% of what consumers eat and drink in the morning comes from their own refrigerators or pantries, according to Portalatin. That leaves plenty of opportunity for fast-food chains — and anyone else who wants a slice of the breakfast pie.

Before the pandemic, fast-food chains started seeing a new rival for their breakfast customers: convenience stores. Regional chains like Wawa in the Northeast and Casey’s General Store in the Midwest were expanding their reach and investing in their foodservice options, taking pages from the fast-food companies’ own playbooks.

For a time, lockdowns and the shift to hybrid work reversed those market share gains. But in the three months ended in July, food-forward convenience stores once again gained the upper hand in the battle to serve consumers breakfast, according to Portalatin.

Circana separates food-forward convenience stores like Buc-ee’s and Sheetz from the broader industry, although more chains may soon fit under that umbrella. 7-Eleven, the biggest convenience, or c-store, in the U.S., is planning to invest more in its prepared foods business, inspired by the success of its Japanese business. C-store chain RaceTrac on Wednesday announced that it’s buying Potbelly for about $566 million, although it’s unclear what its plans for the sandwich chain include beyond expanding its footprint.

In recent years, more diners have been watching their budgets, conscious of rising menu prices and a tight job market.

Year-over-year morning traffic to fast-food chains has fallen every quarter for the last three years, according to data from Revenue Management Solutions, which advises restaurants on how to increase sales and profits. In the second quarter, fast-food breakfast visits fell 8.7%.

To see the struggles, look no further than McDonald’s, which dominates the quick-service breakfast category.

″The breakfast daypart is the most economically sensitive daypart, because it’s the easiest daypart of a stressed consumer to either skip breakfast or choose to eat breakfast at home,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said on the company’s earnings call in late July. “And we, as well as the rest of the industry, are seeing that the breakfast daypart is absolutely the weakest daypart in the day.”

McDonald’s morning visits accounted for 33.5% of its traffic in the first half of 2019 but fell to 29.9% in the first half of 2025, according to Placer.ai data. To try to drum up traffic, the chain has included breakfast items in its new Extra Value Meals, including a deal for a Sausage McMuffin with Egg with a hash brown and a small coffee for $5.

To reverse breakfast’s slide, fast-food chains are taking hints from their competition. After years of convenience stores looking to fast-food chains for ideas on how to grow prepared food sales, from installing ordering kiosks to new menu items, the dynamic has flipped.

″[Quick-service restaurants] are looking at late-night sales and early morning sales, and they are directly looking at convenience stores and saying, ‘What is working? How can we bring that to our stores?’” National Association of Convenience Stores spokesperson Jeff Lenard told CNBC.

Prepared foods have offered a lifeline for convenience stores as demand for gasoline, tobacco and lottery tickets has fallen over time. The industry’s overall foodservice sales reached $121 billion in 2024, according to data from the NACS.

Most customers visit the gas pump during the morning and evening rush hours, on their way to and from work, presenting the perfect opportunity for c-stores to sell them breakfast or dinner. This year, 72% of consumers surveyed by InTouch Insight said they saw c-stores as a real alternative to fast-food chains, up from 56% a year ago and 45% two years ago.

Broadly, the c-stores that have focused on fresh food have been winning over more customers.

For example, Wawa has seen its customer base grow by 11.5% since 2022, while fast-food chains McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s have seen their combined customer base shrink 3.5% in the same time, according to data from Indagari, a transaction data analytics firm.

The majority of 1,170 respondents to an InTouch Insight survey for CNBC said that they have purchased made-to-order breakfast from a c-store in the morning in the past three months. Forty-eight percent of respondents said that when they choose breakfast from a convenience store, they are replacing a visit that they might otherwise make to a fast-food restaurant like McDonald’s or Dunkin’.

Buying coffee and breakfast from a c-store likely won’t be cheaper than making it at home. But consumers perceive it as “good bang for their buck,” according to Sarah Beckett, vice president of sales and marketing for InTouch Insight.

Plus, c-store customers get a wider breadth of options. In addition to coffee, gas stations sell energy drinks, protein shakes and yogurt smoothies. And customers can pick up a granola bar or banana to accompany their breakfast sandwich. Fast-food chains lack that kind of variety.

But above all, what matters to consumers is the food itself.

“While [a] convenience store broadly does have some tailwind from being a lower price point, the ultimate differentiator, and what’s really going to set apart the winners from losers, is that quality aspect of it,” Circana’s Portalatin said.

Brady Caviness, a 33-year-old account executive at Bailiwick who lives in Minneapolis, told CNBC that he indulges in a breakfast pizza from Casey’s General Store when he’s traveling. If he’s back home, where there isn’t a Casey’s nearby, he’ll stop by McDonald’s, Dunkin’ or Starbucks if he’s in the mood to buy his breakfast.

The Iowa-based chain is the country’s third-largest c-store chain and claims to be the fifth-largest pizza concept based on its number of locations. Casey’s reported same-store sales growth of 5.6% for its prepared food and dispensed beverages for the three months ended July 31.

Like Taco Bell’s Mexican Pizza, Casey’s breakfast pizza, topped with cheese, scrambled eggs and a choice of bacon, sausage or vegetables, has grown a cult following since its launch in 2001.

“I think Casey’s is kind of a unique thing,” Caviness said. “My whole life, I’ve had the Egg McMuffins.”

The Labor Department has announced an inquiry into the Bureau of Labor Statistics over recent changes to its data practices.

In a letter published Wednesday, the office of the inspector general for the Labor Department cited the BLS’ recent decision to reduce data collection activities for two key inflation reports, as well as the large downward revision in employment estimates it announced Tuesday. It said it is reviewing the ‘challenges’ the agency has faced ‘in collecting and reporting closely watched economic data.’

The probe comes one month after President Donald Trump fired the head of the BLS as part of a broader pressure campaign that critics say has risked politicizing a part of the government that has long played a crucial role in the business world. The BLS, which is tasked with collecting data on economic indicators such as jobs and inflation, had generally been left alone by previous administrations.

But Trump began zeroing in on the BLS as his frustrations with the Federal Reserve mounted, coinciding with economic numbers that started to warn about a broader U.S. slowdown.

Since then, the labor market has slowed considerably. Just before the head of the BLS was fired, the department released a weaker-than-expected jobs report, citing claims of data manipulation that critics say are unfounded.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, another frequent target of Trump’s, has said Fed policymakers are ‘getting the data that we need to do our jobs’ and stressed the importance of the federal statistical agencies.

‘The government data is really the gold standard in data,’ he added. ‘We need it to be good and to be able to rely on it.’

Trump then nominated E.J. Antoni, an economist with the far-right Heritage Foundation, as the new head of the BLS, a move many economists have criticized.

Trump and other BLS critics have focused on the department’s revisions to its reports, a practice that dates back decades and has been generally seen as a necessary part of the challenge of collecting near-term economic data. It has also faced other challenges in data collection, including budget challenges and low response rates to its collection efforts.

The BLS previously said the decision to reduce inflation data surveys was necessary given existing budget constraints. Meanwhile, mainstream economists say the latest downward revisions — while large — are part of a routine annual process known as benchmarking.

While response rates to the bureau’s surveys have been declining, researchers recently found that revisions and falling response rates did not reduce the reliability of the jobs and inflation reports.