DirecTV, the largest satellite operator in the US and now owned by AT&T, suffered a two-hour outage nationwide on Tuesday morning at about 11am (Eastern Time), March 8.

“We are aware of the outage involving several HD channels and some SD channels and are working to resolve it as quickly as possible,” it said. “We’ll share more information as it becomes available. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience.”

The broadcaster later Tweeted that “multiple national channels” had been affected, and most had been restored by about 1.26pm.  No reasons for the outages have been given.

Channels that were identified as being affected were sports networks ESPN-HD, NFL and news channels CNBC and Fox Business.

Some observers are blaming the outage on a “sun transit outage” when – in effect – the Sun is directly in line a satellite uplink dish, causing solar interference with the satellite link. But usually engineers are only too aware of these happenings and make alternate arrangements for the satellite link.

Categories: Articles, DTH/Satellite