[cross-posted at
Corrente]
Sometime before 5:15 p.m. Central Daylight Time today, Thursday July 27 2006, every network station on my Dish TV-supplied signal began displaying a blue screen with the words WE ARE HAVING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES--PLEASE STAND BY. The problem persisted until 5:55 p.m. or thereabouts when everything (at least the NBC signal) came back on for the final story of the day, appropriately enough about those stunningly annoying "Head-ON" headache inducers/remedy ads.
This was not just NBC that was out either. CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX were all off-"air", and all displaying the same blue box described above.
I have been searching every news outlet i have and googling madly since this was first noticed and there is no mention anywhere of what might have caused this problem. All non-network programming that I had time to check (including network affiliates such as CNBC, MSNBC, FX etc) were working properly.
Oh, and we have one station close enough that we can pull in a feeble signal with rabbit ears, an ABC outlet. It was on the air just fine. So I don't think the Technical Difficulty was at the network's end.
A DishNetwork problem? I suppose that's about all that's left but it beats me how the same problem could hit every network's transponder at exactly the same time. And DishNet is big enough nationwide, in towns as well as out here in the sticks (many people, you will be amazed to learn, hate their cable companies. I know, I know, it shocked me too...) that several hundred thousand people should have been as freaked out as I was. Well, okay, some proportion of the affected audience were not waiting for network news, and another segment is not quite as rampantly paranoid as I am. But still.
I post this mostly to have the incident mentioned in a public record somewhere. There are times when all you can do is record a datum whether you have any durn explanation for it or not.
Anybody else see this happen, or observed it in the past?