Fans were left baffled after ITV's coverage of the World Cup match between Argentina and Saudi Arabia unexpectedly cut out during the Saudi national anthem.
The coverage of the match, which was hotly anticipated due to the first appearance of Lionel Messi at the tournament, was briefly halted as the Saudi Arabia team sang their national anthem.
A colourful error message popped up on the screen for a few seconds along with static sounds. Coverage dropped twice and ITV commentator Sam Matterface apologised for the mishap shortly after the glitch occurred. He said: "Welcome back here to the Lusail Stadium, north of Doha. Firstly, we'd like to apologise for the brief loss of pictures during the Saudi national anthem."
Lead anchor Laura Woods also mentioned the incident at the break. She said: "You may have noticed a bit break up during the Saudi Arabia national anthem. It was a world feed issue, experienced by all broadcasters around the world that were taking that feed."
Fans were left bemused by the incident on social media and were quick to point the finger at ITV, who have already suffered technical difficulties during the tournament.
One fan tweeted: "ITV's coverage already cutting out", while another quipped: "ITV please stop f****** up."
The brief outage, which led to Matterface's apology, means that broadcasters have had to say sorry twice in as many days for unexpected outages during the coverage of the tournament.
BBC Sport pundit Gary Lineker was forced to apologise on air during the half-time break of England's comprehensive 6-2 victory over Iran on Monday due to issues with the iPlayer feed.
The former England striker said: "Just a quick pointer, apologies if you've had any BBC iPlayer issues during that first half. We're working to fix them."
The BBC also responded in a statement, that read: "We're aware of an issue affecting some users on BBC iPlayer. We're trying to fix this as soon as possible."
There were over 10,000 issues logged on the outage tracking website Down Detector. Of those who reported problems, 40 per cent said that they were experiencing issues with video streaming. 39 per cent claimed there were issues with server connection, while 22 per cent had problems with the app.
Shortly after the feed went back up, Saudi Arabia were trailing courtesy of a clinical 10th-minute penalty from Messi.
The Argentine superstar - who has admitted that the tournament in Qatar is likely to be his last-ever World Cup - made no mistake from the spot after VAR intervened early in the match.
