AT&T Responds to DirecTV outage of Fox News

A few days ago, several DirecTV stations, including Fox News, experienced outages on DirectTV that had customers fuming.

We asked DirecTV’s parent company, AT&T, for comment on the outage and customer service failures.

Friday, AT&T’s media relations folks responded with a statement saying that several HD channels had experienced “technical issues”:

A technical issue impacted the high definition (HD) channels of the following networks for our satellite customers: 

–          BBC World News
–          CNN
–          Comedy Central
–          FOX News
–          Fusion
–          Golf
–          NBC Sports
–          Ovation 

With the exception of Fusion and BBC World News, we continued to provide the standard definition (SD) versions of these channels to our customers. We proactively reached out to customers via social and online channels to help ensure that they understood how to view the content. 

The HD versions of these channels for most customers were back online early this afternoon CT. 

We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience.

The statement doesn’t explain the outage’s cause, but it’s more information than customers have been receiving directly from the company.

Stockholders and customers are likely to demand a more precise explanation of the cause should it occur again on Monday and Tuesday just ahead of the election.