Sunday, September 28, 2008

Cardiff, Wales —The British Broadcasting Corporation‘s (BBC) entire analogue, DTT and Satellite service was taken swiftly off air today for over 7 hours following a massive power failure at Broadcasting House in Llandaff, Cardiff. The outage hit at 10:30UTC this morning, and was further compounded by the fact that the building’s back up generators failed to start, bringing the whole service to a total standstill.

BBC1 and BBC2’s regional opt-outs for Wales were very quickly fed into another service, relaying BBC Northern Ireland for most of the day, while BBC Radio Wales fell silent. The Welsh language broadcasting service, BBC Radio Cymru had to switch to taking a feed from BBC Radio 4’s long wave service until 17:05UTC, when service was restored, and BBC News and Sport interactive for the Principality went offline, with no updates throughout the day.

During this time, the BBC’s main switchboard in London became jammed with callers, and BBC Information and BBC Reception Advice services had queue times up to 20 minutes to speak to advisors.