‘CBS Evening News’ Blacks out Due to Technical Issue

A technical issue caused a significant interruption for viewers on the east coast Tuesday night. The CBS Evening News With Norah O’Donnell didn’t air in several east coast markets due to a glitch in Washington D.C. (where the broadcast is based), according to Variety.

Instead of the usual 6:30 p.m. broadcast with O’Donnell, the network accidentally aired a feed from CBSN, its 24-hour digital news network. The official CBS News Twitter account apologized for the mishap, blaming the blackout on “technical issues.” It also promised to resume the nightly news show “as soon as possible.” The glitch also happened to occur during the episode that the host was slated to sit down with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

As the outlet noted, part of the issue stems from the fact that the center of operations isn’t currently based in New York City due to coronavirus concerns. This has resulted in scores of personnel working from home, which can make it more challenging to locate the source of issues such as these.

The Evening News outage marks the latest in a string of outages that came as millions of viewers in the U.S., not to mention the world over, were stung by sudden blackouts in a time where there was little else to do but stay home and watch TV. Most of the outages happened back in March, just as quarantining was becoming the norm.

In mid-March, DirectTV ended up briefly going dark during primetime, which caused viewers to miss out on crucial moments in shows ranging from The Masked Singer to Survivor to Chicago Med. Just days later, Hulu also experienced an outage, both of which caused a surge in frustrated tweets.

Even Netflix, which has lowered its streaming quality in entire countries to help keep up with increased demand, has not been immune to the issue. In late March, some viewers began to report that the service was not working. As more people complained, it ended up leading to a widespread outage. Given the popularity of the streaming app, not to mention this was only a few days after Tiger King premiered, the widespread outages sparked a social media wildfire all their own.