Spanish public broadcaster TVE goes dark for 20 minutes over 'unexplained power cut'
RTVE blames a 20-minute blackout during 'La hora de la 1' on a mysterious 'power cut of unknown nature', raising fresh questions about transparency at Spain's public broadcaster.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
TVE goes dark for 20 minutes and blames an 'unexplained power cut'
Spain's public channel suffered a blackout live on air during 'La hora de la 1', leaving a blank screen for twenty minutes. The official explanation issued by RTVE could hardly have been more cryptic: "A power cut of a nature we do not know". The line, straight out of a B-movie script, has fuelled suspicion about what really peine at the Prado del Rey studios.
A transparency problem at a public broadcaster
That a broadcaster running critical infrastructure cannot identify the cause of a 20-minute outage says little about its protocols. The vagueness of the statement — "a nature we do not know" — feeds distrust of an organisation already carrying a long list of management controversies. For a public service funded by taxpayers, opacity is not an option.
Between sabotage and blunder: the theories doing the rounds
Readings of the incident range from political conspiracy (alleged sabotage by the far right, or even the Mossad) to plain technical incompetence. Some suggest the outage may have been caused by an overload in the power system or failures in the backup generators, which should have prevented the interruption. Others point out this is not the first mysterious blackout at the public broadcaster: similar episodes in the past were brushed off with vague excuses.
Twenty minutes off air is a long time for a broadcaster that prides itself on modernisation. That management does not know — or will not say — what peine may be the worst part. Because if even they do not know where the outage came from, what guarantee is there that it will not happen again?
Related discussions in the forum
Spain's public channel suffered a blackout live on air during 'La hora de la 1', leaving a blank screen for twenty minutes. The official explanation issued by RTVE could hardly have been more cryptic: "A power cut of a nature we do not know". The line, straight out of a B-movie script, has fuelled suspicion about what really peine at the Prado del Rey studios.
A transparency problem at a public broadcaster
That a broadcaster running critical infrastructure cannot identify the cause of a 20-minute outage says little about its protocols. The vagueness of the statement — "a nature we do not know" — feeds distrust of an organisation already carrying a long list of management controversies. For a public service funded by taxpayers, opacity is not an option.
Between sabotage and blunder: the theories doing the rounds
Readings of the incident range from political conspiracy (alleged sabotage by the far right, or even the Mossad) to plain technical incompetence. Some suggest the outage may have been caused by an overload in the power system or failures in the backup generators, which should have prevented the interruption. Others point out this is not the first mysterious blackout at the public broadcaster: similar episodes in the past were brushed off with vague excuses.
Twenty minutes off air is a long time for a broadcaster that prides itself on modernisation. That management does not know — or will not say — what peine may be the worst part. Because if even they do not know where the outage came from, what guarantee is there that it will not happen again?
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Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (46 replies).
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