When you’re watching a sporting event that goes down to the wire, the last things you want are power outages, breaking news or technical difficulties. For viewers of WPSD in Paducah, KY which serves Western Kentucky, Southern Illinois and the Missouri Bootheel, they got the latter. The station suffered lengthy outages three times during the second half as well as the postgame and other minor ones throughout the game.

According to a station official, a house fire nearby the transmitter located in Monkeys Eyebrow, KY may have caused the outage, an investigation is ongoing. The Southern Illinoisan reports that the fire may have caused the transmitter to shut itself down in order to prevent a power surge or spike.

Of course, it caused viewers to go to social media to express their outrage at losing the signal:

https://twitter.com/DStuck98/status/562067674633469952

During the outage, WPSD encouraged viewers to go online to watch the Big Game:

And later, WPSD added this statement:

If you watched the Super Bowl on Local 6, you experienced several outages.

We had three lengthy outages, and a few shorter ones.

It was due to problems at our transmitter.

Our engineers are still working to determine why the outages happened.

We apologize for the inconvenience it caused you and are working to fix the problem.

The outage occurred at the worst possible time for viewers. Certainly a house fire could not be helped, but overall, the last thing viewers want to hear is “We are working on it.”

[The Southern Illinoisan]

About Ken Fang

Ken has been covering the sports media in earnest at his own site, Fang's Bites since May 2007 and at Awful Announcing since March 2013.

He provides a unique perspective having been an award-winning radio news reporter in Providence and having worked in local television.

Fang celebrates the four Boston Red Sox World Championships in the 21st Century, but continues to be a long-suffering Cleveland Browns fan.