Tech

Sky Glass customers fume as widespread outage leaves TVs non-functional for days

In context: Sky Glass TV is an ambitious reimagining of the television experience unveiled in the UK in 2021. It’s an all-encompassing device that weighs a whopping 35kg and eliminates the need for a satellite dish, set-top box, or any other external device. Unfortunately, it’s been reduced to a useless albeit fancy-looking brick these past few days thanks to an unresolved issue plaguing the devices since Thursday.

A major outage has left hundreds of Sky Glass smart TV and Sky streaming service customers across the UK in a nightmare of boredom and frustration. The devices have been stuck on a blank screen and there’s seemingly no fix yet.

The issues started appearing on Thursday around 9 pm BST with reports flooding into outage tracker Downdetector. The complaints have continued, with issue tallies still elevated as of Sunday, four days after the problem began.

Customers have taken to social media and Sky’s community forums to vent. Many shared videos of unresponsive sets with slowly blinking standby lights as the only sign of life.

“Firstly, please accept our sincere apologies for this problem and your patience whilst we work through this problem. We have been working through the night to improve this problem. For those who are still impacted, can you now carry out these steps, please? We continue to work on the problem in the background,” a Sky employee posted on the forums. They also pointed owners to a troubleshooting guide for manually restarting affected TV sets.

However, that seems to have done little to alleviate the hundreds left high and dry without access to live sports, shows, and movies for days on end. A “Sky Glass Power up Issues” thread on the company’s community boards has ballooned to over 200 pages of complaints.

While some feel they’re owed refunds or bill credits for the TV service blackout, Sky has been silent on any plans for making it up to customers.

The problems have fueled speculation that a botched firmware update may be the culprit behind the problem. However, it’s not just the Glass models that are affected. Owners of the separate Sky Stream puck for streaming Netflix, Disney+, and other services to regular TVs are also reporting issues.

While outages are never fun, this one stings extra for Sky. In unveiling the Glass TVs, the company made a big bet on pivoting from satellites to streaming as the future of home entertainment. Perhaps in its rush to embrace internet streaming, however, Sky overlooked some of the intricate update processes and redundancies that consumer tech giants have spent years refining.

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