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Eight DirecTV channels back on the air after outage due to ‘technical difficulties’

A DirecTV satellite dish on a home in Palo Alto.
(Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
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Eight DirecTV channels that were knocked out nationwide by “technical difficulties” early Friday morning were back on the air in the afternoon, said AT&T, the parent company of the pay-TV provider.

The outage, which affected high-definition channels, lasted more than five hours.

Six of those channels — CNN, Fox News, Comedy Central, Golf, NBC Sports and Ovation — remained available in standard definition throughout the outage. Two channels — Fusion and BBC World News — were not available in either format, Dallas-based AT&T said.

“We proactively reached out to customers via social and online channels to help ensure that they understood how to view the content,” the company said in a statement. “We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience.”

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DirecTV has more than 20 million customers, including about 1.25 million in the Los Angeles region.

The outage was another awkward development for AT&T, which two weeks ago unveiled its $85-billion takeover of Time Warner — a deal that critics have charged would give the already powerful telecom company even more control over news and entertainment.

Also, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on Wednesday alleging that DirecTV engaged in an illegal scheme to prevent Los Angeles residents from receiving a television channel owned by the Los Angeles Dodgers.

daniel.miller@latimes.com

Follow @DanielNMiller on Twitter for film business news.

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UPDATES:

2:30 p.m.: This article was updated with the return of DirecTV’s service.

This article was originally published at 11:05 a.m.

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