Wind! Water! Fire!
No people, not a Captain Planet rerun but the things satellite pay-TV operators fear most and blame for signal outage.
While MultiChoice often blames rain fade and runs educational Chuck Norris promos about the impact of inclement weather to explain DStv signal loss, spare a thought for America's biggest satellite pay-TV operator, DirecTV which suddenly lost multiple HD, SD and audio channels on Tuesday afternoon across the entire United States.
The cause of signal loss across the entire country? You guessed it. Not Higgish Greedly, but the power of Wheeler: fire!
From New York to Los Angeles and everywhere in-between DirecTV saw customers lose their signals of multiple TV channels due to interference from the sun's rays - or solar radiation if you want to use the precise term.
"We are aware of the outage involving several HD channels and some SD channels and are working to resolve it as quickly as possible," said DirecTV. "We'll share more information as it becomes available. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience".
While DirecTV was waiting for information, media reported that DirecTV lost the ability to beam channels due to what is called - and learn and remember this one children of Gaia - "sun transit outage".
DirecTV is being impacted because its satellite link is in line with the sun, causing solar interference with its satellite signals.
