Broadcast outages happen. You hope that they don’t happen in the middle of a crucial playoff game.
Unfortunately for TNT Sports, that happened early in Game 2 of the American League Division Series between the Detroit Tigers and Cleveland Guardians.
TBS executives watching their network crash during a playoff game pic.twitter.com/0P0Dpwd0d5
— sky (@GonsolinRBW) October 7, 2024
The transmission issue seemingly impacted viewers watching on both TBS and truTV and across several different distributors, suggesting that the source of the technical mishap was on TNT Sports’ side of the equation. The game feed went down for several minutes, and fans were left wondering what happened.
Play-by-play announcer Brian Anderson and analyst Jeff Francoeur made no mention of the technical difficulties during the broadcast, which went dark for a large portion of viewers.
It’s an unfortunate blunder for TNT Sports, especially considering that the MLB playoffs will arguably be the company’s crown jewel if they lose NBA rights after this upcoming season, as expected.
Luckily, whatever the issue was has seemingly been fixed, and the rest of the broadcast has gone on as expected. Hopefully, for baseball fans, this was an isolated incident.
UPDATE: TBS says the issue was caused by Solar Satellite Interference, also known as a ‘sun outage’ or ‘sunspot,’ which happens when the sun’s solar activity disrupts satellite signals.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.