CNN went off the air for about 30 minutes after a Warner Bros. Discovery outage impacted its channels.
An episode of Inside Politics was airing when the network’s signal was interrupted shortly after 12 p.m. ET on Monday. Viewers’ screens glitched, obscuring the broadcast with multi-colored pixels.
At 12:14 p.m., more than 900 people reported problems with CNN to the Downdetector site.
The show’s anchor, Dana Bash, was conducting a panel on President Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada when the outage happened, according to CNN’s Chief Media Analyst Brian Stelter. The conflict rapidly escalated over the weekend after failed trade talks between the U.S. and its northern neighbor.
“We are aware of a technical issue across Warner Bros. Discovery that resulted in losing CNN channels for a period of time today,” CNN wrote on X at 12:48 p.m.
“We are working quickly to resolve it and apologize for the interruption,” the statement continued.
Warner Bros., CNN’s parent company, also operates HBO, TCL, TNT and other channels.
Just before 1 p.m., the number of CNN issues reported to Downdetector dropped to 63. Of those who reported a problem, 79 percent said it was from the network’s live channel.
Some worried that CNN had been hacked during the chaotic broadcast.
“The streams of both CNN and CNN International are garbled. Have been for about fifteen minutes, now…Were they hacked?” one person wrote on Downdetector.
Another said, “CNN looks like it's been hacked. Their feed is all messed up.”
But Bash cleared up any confusion when the show returned to air at around 12:50 p.m.
“Welcome back and we are back. There was a technical issue across Warner Bros. Discovery's channels that resulted in losing our signal. We're very sorry for the interruption. We are very happy to be back,” she said.
The Independent has reached out to CNN and Warner Bros. for comment.
