Freeview Disruption Blamed On Atmospherics

Viewers of Freeview channels in the United Kingdom this week have seen disruption to TV channels including ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC, caused by weather conditions.

The digital TV platform admitted that from Monday this week, there have been reception problems because of high-pressure weather conditions.

Indeed, from Monday 30 December, there was a spike in complaints noted on the outage website Downdetector.com, starting in the afternoon and continuing into Tuesday 31 December.

Troublesome atmospherics

The BBC reported that there has been nearly 5,000 comments from users affected by the problem.

Freeview has reported said that those people affected should not re-tune their TV sets or boxes.

But the good news is that viewers can still watch live and on-demand TV on an internet connected Freeview Play TV.

Or customers can live stream shows via the Freeview mobile app.

“At the moment, it looks as though these conditions may continue throughout the week,” Freeview was quoted by the BBC as saying in a statement.

At the time of writing it is unclear how many people have been affected by the problem, but the high pressure weather conditions over Wales, south-west England, south-east England, East Anglia, parts of the Midlands and Yorkshire has been blamed for the disruption.

Weather outages

Outages caused by weather conditions tend to be somewhat rare, but they can happen.

In 2015 for example, record-breaking temperatures in Western Australia knocked out a data centre in Perth.

And in 2012 Hurricane Sandy smashed into the eastern seaboard of the United States, with the superstorm knocking out 25 percent of all the cell towers across 10 states and causing massive power outages and other damage.

How well do you know the cloud? Try our quiz!