We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties

"Nonononono! Oh. My god. Oh my god. It's the sum of all my fears. I don't know what happened. Cut the cameras! Cut to commercial!"

— Binging with Babish, "Tiramisu from Superbad"

For the proper reading experience, play the music from this video while reading on.

In real life, when a broadcaster is having technical difficulties, often with transmitting equipment or loss of video/audio feed, the station will put on screen a card stating "We are having technical difficulties" or "Please Stand By", accompanied by stock music. This is rare nowadays in most countries, but the practice is still referred to in fiction.

However, when this happens in fiction, it indicates not mundane malfunctions, but something either funny or deeply disturbing. And the latter usually happens when the news is being aired, or in the newsroom itself.

Sometimes played for Black Comedy if the presentation of the message sharply contrasts with the horror of the scene. An even darker version is when the message is displayed, but the horrible noise in the background indicates what is actually going on. It may also happen if the Genre Blind news reporter tries to get an exclusive interview with the Eldritch Abomination.

There may be other not-really-technical difficulties such as a fight breaking out on live TV or a performer (or news anchor) having an emotional breakdown, disrobing on live TV, dying, or saying something so controversial that it will cause backlash from the network censors or, worse, the FCC (and their national equivalents abroad). Actual technical difficulties are vanishingly rare in fictionland, and thanks to many stations now being run by their corporate owners from one hub (for instance, Fox runs many of their owned stations from New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston), in reality also. Sometimes the message pops up as a result of Camera Abuse, which could be a valid case of technical difficulty.

Can be used similarly to News Monopoly — if every station is Experiencing Technical Difficulties at the same time, something is seriously wrong.

Compare with Relax-o-Vision (an innocuous image is substituted for a disturbing one), Do Not Adjust Your Set (an outside intrusion overrides the signal), and Snowy Screen of Death (damage to the camera causes the signal to flicker out and die).

Often, "Spanish Flea" from Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass will appear as background music in this trope, or an instrumental recording of "The Girl From Ipanema", which also shows up in elevators. Sometimes the Intermission song from Monty Python and the Holy Grail is used as well, particularly among video game streamers or in Web Original works where copyright isn't as much of an issue.

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Examples:

Advertising

• One ad for fast food chain Jack in the Box's "Jack vs Martha Stewart" series has Jack confront Martha in her own studio. Martha comes over and ends up grabbing Jack's nose clean off. The shock from both parties leads to color bars accompanied by Martha shrugging, with the text "Technical Difficulties, Please Stand By".
• For the 2015 Super Bowl, Chevrolet made an ad showing a brief aerial shot of the stadium, before having the footage horribly glitch out and cut to black. The commercial then asks: "What would you do if your TV went out?" and suggests using the 4G Wi-Fi in the new Colorado to stream the game.

Anime & Manga

• In one episode of Death Note, the cult of Kira is being broadcast live worshipping him. Since they are presented as basically a scam, Mikami uses his death note to kill all of them. After their gruesome heart attacks, the screen changes to a "cutesy" "be-right-back" message.
• The anime version of Pesche drawing his sword in Bleach culminated with an angry Pesche declaring his "thing" was much bigger and better than Ishida's. Mid-rant, the video cut to a title screen with a puppet telling the audience not to act like Pesche.
• One-Punch Man uses this after Saitama mistakenly pulls a Groin Attack on Speed of Sound Sonic.
• In episode 32a of Jewelpet Sunshine, when a babified Ruby fills her diaper while being carried on Kanon's back, a screen reading "We are experiencing technical difficulties." and depicting an anthropomorphic wad of feces briefly appears.

Comic Books

• Tintin: In Tintin and the Picaros, San Theodoran television shows a Kangaroo Court sentencing Castafiore to life imprisonment, at which point she starts to sing an aria. It quickly cuts to a "PLEASE EXCUSE THIS INTERRUPTION" message, followed by a cartoon interlude.
• Used in The Sandman (1989) when Dr. Destiny makes the world go crazy and a kids' show host encourages children to commit suicide.

Films — Animation

• The Castle of Cagliostro: This happens to the broadcast of the Count's wedding, courtesy of some of his Elite Mooks, after Lupin starts disrupting things. Unlike most such examples, the broadcast is soon restored because the newscaster so happens to be Fujiko, who is quite capable of defeating them.
• In Osmosis Jones, during the meltdown in Frank's body, when the two news anchors start arguing and beating each other up, we get "PLEASE STAND BY". We don't see them again until all the danger's clear.

Films — Live-Action

• Shaun of the Dead features a sequence where a character flips through the channels and sees nothing but Technical Difficulty screens, even on the satellite channels which normally only stop working due to bad weather affecting the signal (such as the Discovery Channel).
• Romero's Living Dead Series films:
  • In the opening scene of Night of the Living Dead (1968), Johnny switches off the radio just as an announcement of this kind is being made.
  • The original Dawn of the Dead (1978) starts with two of the main characters leaving the TV studio where they work, as this type of message is put on.
• Gremlins 2: The New Batch:
  • This ultimately happens on every single channel shown by Clamp Cable as the titular critters wreak havoc throughout the building. Bonus points because the technical difficulties title card bear the image of a grinning gremlin.
  • Even better when Clamp authorizes the "Final Broadcast" where a peaceful female voice over images of nature scenes and wildlife says, "Due to the end of civilization as we know it the Clamp Cable Network is now ceasing transmission." This is a parody of an Urban Legend that CNN has a tape narrated by Ted Turner over nature scenery ready to roll to close out world history just in case of global annihilation. In 2001, the New York Daily News reported that CNN does have a tape prepared for an end-of-the-world scenario, but it consists of a recording of "Nearer, My God, to Thee" over footage of a waving American flag. No nature footage.
• The original Godzilla (1954) has this when a radio newsreader is killed. Interestingly, we see the scene from his perspective. He keeps on reporting on the situation even as Godzilla is bringing down the tower he's standing on, fully realizing he's about to be killed, and announcing this fact to his listeners.
• A humorous example in the film I Am Curious (Yellow): Lena and her friend Börje are about to make love in her archive room. There's no bed, so they drag in a mattress and some sheets and pillows from another room, and make all sorts of elaborate preparations. At the moment they actually begin intercourse, a test pattern flips up on the screen. Cut to a pleasant looking announcer fixing her hair, not realizing she's already on camera. She says "We regret that we have had some technical difficulties owing to erection fault" (or "faulty coupling", depending on the translation).
• Network parodies this and references the Christine Chubbuck tragedy after Howard Beale sarcastically announces that he's going to commit suicide on camera. At first the studio staff don't realize he's said it, mumbling gossip while the commercial is on; then panic, they open the studio mike to communicate with Howard, the immortal words "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON" go out to 67 affiliates, he replies that he can't hear what they're saying, they come back from commercial and Howard is being pulled away from his desk by the floor crew — and just as the mayhem really starts the TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES PLEASE STAND BY card flips up.
• Happens in a bonus feature on Finding Nemo when Jean-Michel Cousteau loses it thanks to Nemo, Dory and Marlin.
• In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, a Gas station clerk flicks though multiple channels, each with a test card on. Further proof that Skynet is taking over.
• Problem Child 2 has a patriotic puppet show suddenly hijacked, with the Uncle Sam puppet explaining "We are experiencing technical difficulties," and the bald eagle puppet chiming in with "Yeah — I had to scratch my balls!" The crowd is actually entertained for a change, and bursts into laughter. Naturally, Ben assumes that Junior is the culprit, but he's not.
• At the end of The Running Man, the TV screens all read PLEASE STAND BY after Ben Richards and his girlfriend walk off the game show's studio set.
• When Buzz in Monster Brawl is forced to shoot his fully zombified (it was inevitable) co-host Sidney, the film displays a "please stand by" banner. When the program returns, Buzz is wearing a neckbrace and laments how his co-host had to be put down "like mongrel dog".
• Hell House LLC:
  • The official explanation for how fifteen people, including the entire crew, died. Throughout the film technical problems plague the Hell House team with disastrous results on opening night.
  • In Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel, this remains the official explanation for the disaster in the Abaddon Hotel. Cameras also suffer serious distortions and anomalies whenever seriously supernatural stuff starts happening.
• Occurs near the end of Joker (2019), complete with "Spanish Flea" playing, after Arthur, now taking up the persona of Joker, guns down talkshow host Murray Franklin on live television. Joker grabs the camera, mockingly imitates Murray's catchphrase "And always remember, that's li-" as he's cut off by the studio switching to the Indian head test and playing "Spanish Flea" (although on another screen, we see Joker was jumped by a security guard right after that).
• After the title character of The Cat in the Hat accidentally cuts off part of his own tail, causing him to blurt out a Curse Cut Short by a long bleep censor, a "technical difficulties" card reads "Hang In There, Baby!" featuring an actual cat wearing an outfit similar to the one the title character wears.
• The Truman Show: Truman tricks the cameras watching him with a Sleeping Dummy and sneaks out of the house. When the crew discover that he's missing, Christof (the show's creator) orders them to cut transmission for the first time in the show's 30 year history. Audiences across the world are left with only a title card and a message about technical difficulties. When an executive complains about the chaos, Christof notes the graphic is providing their best viewing figures ever because people are so desperate to know what's happened.
• Halloween III: Season of the Witch: Two of the networks running the Silver Shamrock giveaway ad cut to technical difficulties screens after Dan Challis warns them of the true nature behind them. Given the film's Ambiguous Ending, it's hard to tell whether or not he succeeded in pleading for the third network to cut the broadcast, thus saving the lives of millions of children.

Literature

• This has happened at least twice in the Into the Looking Glass series of novels by John Ringo. Once it was in connection with Deadline News, another time a reporter "failed a SAN check" and started to scream, "I'm reading this on my TelePrompTer, but it's not really happening!"
• Happens in Stephen King's novel The Stand with the offending scene being a live assassination game show.

Live-Action TV

• There was a Sitcom called Please Stand By named after this, taking place in a family owned-and-operated small market TV station.
• The Outer Limits (1963) was originally titled Please Stand By. However, the title was changed because the producers and the network were afraid that between the title and the famous Opening Narration ("There is nothing wrong with your television set..."), people might mistake the opening sequence for a real emergency alert. (To add some historical perspective, the series premiered not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis.)
• Home Improvement's Show Within a Show Tool Time would sometimes cut to these when Tim injured himself somehow. Such as the time he nailed his foot to the floor, and one of these pops up. Then we hear the sound of his co-host pulling the nail out...
• During a Brass Eye special on Paedophilia, there is "technical difficulties", as a member of the militant paedophile organisation "Milit-Pede" attacks the studio.
• Seen on The Colbert Report many times, usually when Stephen is doing something that would get him arrested or at the very least result in a lot of viewer complaints.
  • The show experienced "technical difficulties" during the week the show spent in Iraq when Colbert is tranquilised with a dart in his neck and secretly transported to an "undisclosed American military location in Iraq".
  • The January 7, 2013 show saw him invoke the wrath of the Technical Difficulties screen + lawyer appearing three times. First, when commenting on Bill O'Reilly's over-generalization of Asians, he said that black people were fast because they came from Africa, then the screen cut to a technical difficulties image.
    Colbert: Well, folks, I have been informed by my network's lawyer that even when complimenting, I should not racially generalize, and I assume he is right, Jews make the best lawyers—[cue second Technical Difficulties screen)
• Played for laughs on an episode of Empty Nest. Womanizer Charlie Dietz becomes a meteorologist on the local news and compares the size of some hailstones to the anchorwoman's breasts. Cue the trope.
• A common subtrope for British shows that use this is to cut away to the classic Test Card F girl or a humorously modified version to fit the show. Used for example in Zero Punctuation.
• British one-off Halloween Special Ghostwatch does this just as things start heating up in the Haunted House.
• In the Babylon 5 episode "Severed Dreams", an ISN reporter interrupts the news broadcast to announce that several Earth colonies have seceded in protest of President Clark's bombing of Mars and that armed troops have invaded ISN headquarters. An explosion is heard, then the broadcast goes off the air and is replaced by a network logo (without an explicit "Technical Difficulties" message, but with the same implications).
• Saturday Night Live has used this multiple times.
  • One sketch involved a children's show called "Jingleheimer Junction", with characters personifying Friendship, Unity, Caring, and Kindness. And yes, they all had their initials written on them. Naturally, this trope was used repeatedly (telling viewers that they would be back in a "Jingleheimer Jiffy").
  • A season 28 sketch has host Bernie Mac playing a game show host, and he asks a contestant the question "Who is Winnie the Pooh's feline friend?". As the contestant is about to answer, the scene cuts to a "Please Stand By" screen, and then cuts to the host attacking the contestant, who is shouting "I meant to say Tigger, with a T!".
  • On the season 35 episode hosted by Drew Barrymore (for the sixth time, making her the show's most frequent female celebrity host), there was a sketch featuring a cooking show on the roof of a building. The show cuts to a "Please Stand By" placard every time the show hosts (played by Drew Barrymore and Andy Samberg) are attacked by crows (which are attracted to the bread crumbs the two are using for chicken parmigiana).
  • The TV Funhouse sketch "Conspiracy Theory Rock" immediately cut to a "Please Stand By" card (with the NBC peacock sweating nervously) as the song continued to accuse NBC of being GE's lackey. The song even pointed out that this trope is used as a cheap way to censor out anything sponsors or the network may deem inappropriate ("'Please stand by'/'Please stand by'/It means there's technical difficulties, supposedly/So if you see/A "Please Stand By"/You know it's all part of GE's big lie...")
• In one rather hilarious example on Bill Nye the Science Guy this happens when Bill flicks a red-kneed tarantula onto the cameraman, causing the cameraman to drop the camera onto the floor. The cameraman screams "THE TARANTULA'S CRAWLING IN MY PANTS!!" while the trope name is broadcast on the screen.
• Dead Set features any number of them. In this case the hopelessly non-descript "PLEASE STAND BY" of the messages serve to underline just how quickly and violently overrun everything was.
• The "Commentary by Gernot Hassknecht" in the German political satire show Heute Show always ends with this, after Hassknecht starts his inevitable Cluster F Bombing.
• 30 Rock uses this graphic.◊ (And no, it's not used by NBC in real life.)
• In the first season finale of The Hour, during the Show Within a Show, a graphic with this description goes up when a government official and higher-ups at the BBC think the show has gone too far.
• Played for laughs on Sports Night; in the episode "Thespis", the Show Within a Show has been plagued by difficulties all night, and the latest is when a power grid goes off upstate, which affects their transmission and forces them to put up the graphic detailing technical difficulties.
• James May's Man Lab: The cameraman gets so bored with the crew's argument over how to make tea that he simply puts his camera down and walks off. Cue an absolutely terrifying version of Test Card F, with Oz Clarke as the girl and James as the clown.
• In At Last the 1948 Show, a costume drama in the vein of The Forsyte Saga has been de-railed by heads of programming leading visiting TV executives from first Jordan, then Nigeria onto the set, unaware they are broadcasting live. The continuity announcer snaps that perhaps the head of children's television will follow this by leading a group of Eskimos onto the set. A placard appears reading "Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible" — and, sure enough, the head of children's television and a group of Eskimos smash straight through the placard.
• Right before the panelists show the audience their genitalia in the "Justice" episode of QI, the screen switches to the color test card.
  Oh, dear! We, um, seem to have a technical problem. We're working to fix that as soon as we can. Uh Good, it's fixed now, so let's get straight back to QI. Hopefully, we haven't missed anything quite interesting.
• The Last Leg:
  • This trope was played for laughs several times in series 6, usually whenever someone was about to say something controversial.
  • Also subverted for the first episode of series 7, when genuine technical issues interrupted the programme for several minutes. This was then played for laughs in the following episode, when Alex was unimpressed with the voice over man, to which the latter interrupted the programme straightaway to insult Alex back.
• The Goodies. In "Invasion of the Moon Creatures", Graeme Garden loses contact with the moon rocket after it's hit by a meteor shower, whereupon his video screen shows: NORMAL SERVICE WILL BE RESUMED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
  Graeme: This is Mission Control, are you receiving me? Please come in! [screen shows image of Mr Spock] Push off, you!
• Several characters in The Morning Show are eventually silenced by a test pattern.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus had this narration over the BBC world logo:
  ANNOUNCER: We interrupt this programme to annoy you and to be generally bothersome.
  Later...
  ANNOUNCER: We interrupt this programme A. to annoy you; and B. to provide work for one of our announcers.
• In the Ziwe episode "Democracy", when Plague Doctor Richard Nixon spins the "Mobilize the Vote" wheel and it lands on "Haters" (Makes Just as Much Sense in Context), Bob The Drag Queen cheerily quips "Oh, this is your people!" at Ziwe. She gives Bob a Death Glare as she spurns her for "coming on her show just to insult her" as though gearing up to beat her ass, followed by a cut to an all-pink SMPTE colorbars reading "Please standby we're experiencing technical difficulties."
• Invoked in the Aerobics Competition sketch on Key & Peele.

Music

• Used repeatedly in the intro piece "SCG03 Special Report" to the Lordi album The Arockalypse as reporters are clearly taken out by monsters while on air.
• "Technical Difficulties" by Julien-K, a rather indistinct song done for Transformers.

Pro Wrestling

• ECW held their event ECW Gangstas Paradise on September 23, 1995, which produced two TV episodes. Near the end of the first of these shows, there was a locker room confrontation between The Public Enemy and New Jack and 2 Cold Scorpio^note The main event was The Sandman/Scorpio/New Jack vs. The Public Enemy and Mikey Whipwreck in a cage match. where various cameraman were getting knocked out, leading to a "Please Stand By" message appearing on the screen.
• WWE Raw for a time would have a graphic for this which featured, of course, a picture of Triple H. If you do a Google Images search for "Technical Difficulties" and either "Triple H" or "HHH," you will find many parodies of this.
  • DX did somewhat of a parody of this during one of their commercials for their merchandise. The two got into a Take That! contest that culminated with Hunter commenting on Shawn's thinning hair. Cue Shawn attacking Hunter, a quick flash of a graphic of DX with "Technical Difficulties," then flashing back to the two still fighting.

Puppet Shows

• In the Dinosaurs episode, "Network Genius", Earl becomes a TV executive. When he creates programming that makes most of Pangaea's population stupid, the cameraman in the newsroom fails to focus on Howard Handupme's anchoring, bringing up a "PLEEZE STAND BIE" card.

Radio

• Orson Welles' 1938 Mercury Theatre dramatization of The War of the Worlds has one of these, after announcer Carl Phillips is burned up by the Martian heat ray.
• Legendary British DJ John Peel would frequently have issues with the records he was playing, at least partly because they were often demo tapes mailed in by listeners or ridiculously obscure old vinyl he'd found on a market stall the day before the show. "Just talk among yourselves for a bit" and "I'm sorry, I seem to have played that at the wrong speed" became his most iconic catch phrases.
• Most radio stations in the U.S. did this in 1971 when a test of the CONELRAD system was accidentally sent out to stations. The code words matched and broadcasts stopped for an expected presidential address. It wasn’t long before the fact it was a false alarm was pretty much known but it took 45 minutes to find and pass the correct code word to verify it was a false alarm.

Theme Parks

• In the pre-show for Shrek 4D at Universal Studios, Lord Farquaad's ghost flies through the "Dungeon Cam", resulting in it cutting to a technical difficulties screen.

Video Games

• Early in Ape Escape 3, Specter's taunting message to the heroes is interrupted by Dr. Tomoki's overdramatic posturing. When Specter loses his patience, the screen briefly cuts to a "Technical Difficulties" card showing a sad monkey.
• BioShock is littered with TVs that show nothing but a flickering test card reading "PLEASE STAND BY", emphasizing the theme of Rapture being essentially abandoned.
• Likewise, its spiritual predecessor System Shock 2, set on the starship Von Braun, has a movie theater displaying the Tri-Optimum logo, and stuck in a looping countdown with the words "Please Stand By", never showing any movies.
• In the Bleach: Heat the Soul series Mayuri Kurotsuchi can team up with Szayelaporro Granz and get their own special finisher move, in which they do... something to their opponent just as the camera cuts away to a Relax-o-Vision scene before cutting back to the game.
• Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory: In the final episode of Nepstation's Walletcrusher Nep, Neptune wouldn't shut up about the Nep Bull EX II medicine, and how it must have some kind of side effect. Ultimately, the screen went black with the message, "Technical difficulties. Please wait a moment." When the broadcast came back on, she had been removed from the stage.
• Getting a Game Over in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker evokes this, as the screen flickers and goes to static, before switching to a flickering, test card-esque continue screen.
• Played for drama in Modern Warfare 2, where the intro sequence to the mission "Of Their Own Accord" is an emergency broadcast system alert containing evacuation instructions for residents of Washington, D.C..
• The hotel-room-esque Relaxation Chamber you start Portal 2 in has a TV in the corner; the first time you wake up it's off, and the second time it displays this message. It's pretty redundant with everything else going on.
• Shattered Union: In the intro, a news reporter is presenting a report from Washington DC when when the city is nuked.
• A news report on a motel television in Mystery Case Files 9: Shadow Lake is interrupted by a screaming face followed by a technical difficulties sign.
• Snaaaake! uses a technical difficulties sign as a loading screen.
• The remake of the first Journeyman Project game, Pegasus Prime does this. When you're comparing video footage to find how the past was changed, one of them shows spokesperson Enrique Castillo being killed on-stage. The video then cuts to a futuristic TV test card, with the words "Please Stand By" over it.
• Played for laughs in Obsidian. The first dream world is set in an oppressive bureaucracy populated by Vidbots that show human faces when activated. When you finally meet their chief, he loses his temper over all the rules you broke to reach him, so much that his face briefly glitches into an old color test card before he calms down.
• Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4 all have a variation of the classic "Indian head" card that reads "Please Stand By" before loading the title card.
  • Also in-universe in the fourth game. The TV news report cuts to the same "Please Stand By" card as reports of bombing start coming in. And after the apocalypse, when you give power to a television set, the card is all that appears on the screen.
• In stage 2 of Space Channel 5, a test pattern briefly pops up when Jaguar crashes Ulala's broadcast. It also happens in Part 2 when Ulala is apparently killed by Purge, and one of these replaces the loading screen.
• Persona 5 Kunikazu Okumura suffers a mental shutdown and dies in the middle of his press conference. As the people in the studio scream in horror, the screen quickly changes to a cutesy crayon draw of a puppy chasing butterflies while equally cute music plays on the background.
• Pizza Tower: Falling out of bounds will bring up one of three "technical difficulties" screens depicting Pizzaface as a TV director taping Peppino's various misfortunes. One shows Peppino with a broken leg, one shows him lying on the ground in a pile of spaghetti, and one shows him grumbling over dropped ice cream. Similarly, falling out of bounds as Gustavo and Brick brings up a similar screen depicting the two bandaged and bruised. All four screens feature the text "TECHNICAL DIFFICULTY" in the top-left corner and "PLEASE STAND BY" in the bottom-right.
• Sonic Mania: At the end of the Studiopolis Zone Act 2 boss fight, the TV in the background displays a modified version of The BBC's test card F (an Eggman symbol replaces the girl and clown from the original), with loud static. Said static is taken directly from Sonic's 25th Anniversary livestream, where it infamously plagued said stream, and the numbers on the card even match the date of the stream.
• One of the options in Talking Tom And Ben News is seeing both Tom and Ben fight, in two randomly chosen different ways. No matter which way you get, you'll still end up with a technical difficulties screen right after the fight, then the game restarts.
• Invoked in VVVVVV by several room names of the final level. Right after yet another teleporter accident brings the hero to a place that's definitely not right — with Alien Geometries and disquieting music.
• Suikoden III: In the William Tell play, if the Son gets hit, the screen will fade to black, and Nadir will apologize for that technical difficulty.

Web Animation

• This happens in the Zero Punctuation review of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky when the video seemingly begins to stutter like a broken CD. Cut to a still image Yahtzee and an imp playing Tic-Tac-Toe (see Test Card F in the 'Real Life' section below) whilst smooth jazz plays.
  • The same image shows up at the end of his review of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, as he leaves to test a theory of whether replacing the filling of a Cadbury's Creme Egg with Branston Pickle would be a good idea (as an illustration of the concept that just because you can do something, doesn't mean that you should). Predictably, it wasn't.
• Homestar Runner:
  • In the Strong Bad Email "pizzaz", Strong Bad is interviewing himself, and at one point the interviewee gets mad and shouts "This interview is OVER!" Cut to a "HANG IN THERE" card featuring The Cheat standing next to an unplugged cable.
  • The Thanksgiving cartoon "Fall Float Parade" cut to a similar card, with a turkey instead of The Cheat, when the Marshie balloon crashed into the hosts' booth (and, presumably, broadcast equipment).
• DEATH BATTLE!:
  • During the rundown for "Roshi vs. Jiraiya", Boomstick claims that nothing surprises him when it comes to Naruto. Then Wiz hits a button on his arm and poofs into a Sexy Jutsu. Boomstick gets a nosebleed like a pressure washer, and then we cut to a card with Boomstick handling the camera while drunk off his ass (possibly a Shout-Out to the "Dial Z for Zombies" example below).
  • Later during Harley Quinn's analysis in "Harley Quinn vs. Jinx", Ringmaster demonstrates the different types of ammunition Harley's popgun uses, while the boxing glove and streamers don't do anything, Ringmaster ends up breaking the camera by firing an explosive round that ricochets into it, cutting to a card depicting Wiz with his robot arm malfunctioning.
  • During Discord's analysis in "Bill Cipher vs. Discord", Discord himself shows up in the studio with Wiz eager to learn all he can from the Draconequus who obliges by turning him and Boomstick into their respective actors (Ben Singer and Chad James), causing the hosts to panic as it cuts to the same card of Wiz's arm malfunctioning during their screaming.

Webcomics

• Alabaster: The Doomed Session uses this trope both for laughs and horror. Usually you don't want to see more clearly what's behind the noise.
• Bruno the Bandit: Multiple strips:
  • August 21, 1998
  • July 23, 2007
• Blindsprings has a graphic that pops up when a page is delayed from the usual schedule based on the old Indian head test pattern but with Tammy, the main character, shrugging at the top.

Web Videos

• ＬＯＣＡＬ５８ is this trope in action, given that the installments are VHS recordings of a TV station made as a whole bunch of opaquely bad things are happening. One particular installment, “Weather Service,” shows an EAS alert being triggered over a moon-related event that is fought over by a second party intentionally trying to cancel the alert, then by a third party (or possibly the first party) clearly compromised and encouraging everyone to step outside and look at the moon. (And then there’s other “wrong” things like a “show for children” with a deeply sinister premise running at 4:00 am, a “contingency” film where an unknown US government department instructs everyone to commit suicide before hastily showing a “hoax” apology card at the end of the film, and the station supposedly transmitting dash cam footage of a driver getting lost by their GPS.) Given that it’s a series created by Kris Straub of pioneering internet Creepypasta Candle Cove, it makes perfect sense.
• The Spoony Experiment:
  • Combines this with Heroic BSoD when Spoony sees the VHS case for Highlander II: The Quickening call itself "the smartest sci-fi thriller since Blade Runner", though instead of a TV "Please Stand By" card, it invokes a Windows program-crash dialog box ("This application has performed an illegal operation and must close down"). It pops up again in his Ultima VIII review.
  • Other variations include "Spoony needs CPR" after he passes out following a Motor Mouth description of the requirements of a single quest in Ultima VII "We'll be right back! Time for my medicine!" in Mazes and Monsters and an "Insanity Break" after his "transporter psychosis" flares up in the Star Trek: Borg review.
• The Nostalgia Critic:
  • He sometimes switches to this when he really loses it; the "Technical Difficulties" screen shows him in a straitjacket (much like the one on the season five Simpsons episode "Marge on the Lam").
  • Another example is at the start of his review of The Magic Voyage where he goes berserk until he breathes fire, then a cartoon of him taking his "meds" appears with the phrase "One moment please".
• Atop the Fourth Wall: Linkara has occasionally cut to a Relax-o-Vision screen while music from Pokémon plays in the background. See "Countdown to Final Crisis Pt. 1" for an example.
• One of these interrupts TheOrangeInsanity's freak out in his review of The Cat in the Hat, in which he stops caring about the review or the audience and begins screaming the names of fruit for no apparent reason. The screen shows him running away in a straitjacket, still spouting fruit in Pictorial Speech Bubbles and the message "We'll be right back! After this mental breakdown", the second half of it seemingly written in blood.
• What the Fuck Is Wrong with You?: Nash often uses these when a news story is just too much. They usually have a variable message: "Shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down", "Don't worry, we're pretty sure he won't find the gun this time", "Please don't provoke the raging jackass."
• Occasionally, this happens to The Necro Critic whenever something he's reviewing causes an insane breakdown, immediately followed by a brief scene of him after the off-screen sedatives have kicked in.
• Ashens cuts to his logo card with a spanner sticking out a flip-top rendering of his head whenever he runs into difficulties with camera focus, tat malfunctions or it takes a long time to put a 'some assembly required' product together. Alternatively, a version featuring a sad eyed version of the logo with green vomit is used for when a food special item has actually made him sick.
• Brows Held High has a moment where Kyle flips out during the Sweet Movie review over actual footage of war crimes: "Cannibal Holocaust didn't use real bodies —" The screen then cuts to a "missing video" screen for an editing program, with the test card drone playing over it.
• Achievement Hunter:
  • It has a white-on-black "Technical Difficulties" screen accompanied by polka music when a full-length Let's Play experiences a significant delay, such as a Minecraft server crashing and requiring lengthy work behind the scenes. It has become so common of an occurrence that they made a T-shirt out of the screen.
  • On at least two occasions there have been enough cuts due to difficulties that the screen itself began experiencing technical problems, the music and video distorting.
• Oddity Archive naturally has an episode devoted to the subject.
• PONIES The Anthology uses this to comic effect as a transition from one clip to the next, always involving Derpy Hooves in some way.
• Binging with Babish: "Tiramisu from Superbad" was sponsored by Philips Espresso, giving Andrew a convenient excuse to pepper in his own homemade commercials throughout the video, which proved to be greatly beneficial when the springform pan fell open when he was moving it to the fridge. After a brief moment of panic, he has the show cut back to the commercials while he figures out what went wrong.
• The Spiffing Brit: To produce Curse Cut Short: For The Sims 4, when still working on a death room for one family of Sims, his Sim (Lord Farquaad) tried making a grilled cheese sandwich:
  The Spiffing Brit: Oh, look at Farquaad here, tending to his food at night. Isn't he a happy little man? He just leveled up to Level 3 cooking. (stove catches fire) Oh no, he started a fire! Oh god, okay! (Farquaad catches fire) Oooooooh, sh- (the "Please Stand By" test card appears, with an 8-bit variation of Spanish Flea playing)
• Critical Role:
  • Episode 72, campaign 2: After Liam O'Brien goes on an unhinged rant à la Network, the stream cuts to a card with Trinket ^note Vex'ahlia's pet bear from campaign 1, of which Liam's character Vax'ildan is a Cool Uncle to having unplugged the cable.
  • Matthew Mercer and Marisha Ray decided to have a nice fire going during their Q&A session for The Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. They ended up setting off the fire alarm multiple times (once cutting Marisha off in the middle of a sentence), but refused to put it out until Travis Willingham put his foot down and called Marisha, presumably to exercise his CEO position and make them extinguish the fire. The YouTube version promptly cuts to a hand-drawn card of Matt and Marisha frantically trying to put out a blazing fireplace while their pet bird Dagon flies in a panic towards the screen, with cheerful classical music as background.
• I'm a Marvel... And I'm a DC:
  • Subverted in the first confrontation between Jonah Hex and Iron Man, after Hex asked why they replaced Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle in Iron Man 2. But all you did was just stand there for a few seconds and then say, "That's why."
  • Played straight with a Running Gag. Every time someone mentions Bryan Singer, an image of Deadpool tangled in wires appear for a second before cutting back to said characters being reprimanded by lawyers.^note Singer was the target of sexual harassment charges around the time of this example being in play.
• The 07/08/14 episode of Hard News cuts to the SMPTE color bars as Sam commits seppuku on air as a Gory Discretion Shot.
• A series of LoadingReadyRun Crapshots feature a gardening show called Gardening With Greg with a highly-strung host who invariably does something that causes the show to cut to a technical difficulties card. The last episode reveals that most people actually watch the show specifically for these moments rather than for gardening advice.
• A staple of davemadson (yes, THAT davemadson)'s Funny Signs series, "technical difficulties" cards are usually put up in the aftermath of a tantrum, which sometimes plants at least one character in the ground.
• Carmilla In Season 3, while Laura is filming the team's activities, she and Carmilla are attempting to maintain a plutonic relationship. Twice they find themselves lapsing and doing it on Laura's desk in front of her webcam, which is promptly interrupted by a "technical difficulties" card, and then a shot of a disheveled and mortally embarrassed Laura.

Western Animation

• In the Archer short “Cooking with Archer”, a brawl ensues between Archer and celebrity chef Alton Brown after they start throwing food at each other. The scene cuts away to a Technical Difficulties card, and about thirty seconds later, the scene resumes with Alton finishing the dish, Archer’s newly remodeled kitchen destroyed, and Archer stuck head-first through the oven door.
• Happens on the Beavis and Butt-Head episode "Tornado" where B&B are watching "Barney Bakes a Cake". Barney the Dinosaur sets himself on fire and we hear him [the guy in the highly flammable Barney suit] screaming "Ow, ow! I'm burning! Kids, help! This sucks!" behind the caption (the Edited for Syndication version immediately cut to the technical difficulties card featuring a blue Big Bird rather than show Barney's hands catching fire and shortened his line to "Kids, help! This sucks!") Heh-heh. Heh-heh.
• The Critic has many pun-based technical difficulty signs used on Coming Attractions with Jay Sherman, such as "We'll be right bark!" with a picture of Jay as a dog.
• A card depicting a panicking cameraman dousing another guy with a fire extinguisher (in trying to aim for a camera that's on fire) appeared a few times in Dilbert, including once where a Bob Ross-Expy named Rusty Shanks was assaulted by a hitman from the "five families of art" (leading to a Brick Joke where Dilbert is delivered Rusty's head on a platter at a restaurant).
• One episode of Freakazoid! starts like this, while you hear Freakzoid hastily try to put the finishing touches on the show in the background.
• The Futurama episode "Bender Should Not Be Allowed On Television" had one after a child actor robot breaks down (literally) during an episode of All My Circuits. The technical difficulties card had a broken robot shrugging his shoulders and the words, "Oops! Broken Actor" and the show cuts to an episode of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad (which, Fry remarks, "...has been going downhill since season three").
  • Also used during the episode "The Problem With Popplers" when the Omicronians return to Earth, and the news station starts falling apart from the shaking.
  Linda: We seem to be experiencing technical difficulties...
  (Beam falls in the background)
  Linda: ...and crap like I've never seen before!
• One short for Gravity Falls featured a commercial for a show called, "Lil' Gideon's Big House", which starred Lil' Gideon after he was sent to prison at the end of the first season. It ends with a still of a sparrow with the words 'TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES' 'PLEASE STAND BY' and Bud Gleeful saying, "Lil' Gideon's Big House will return as soon as we contain this riot."
• The Bugs Bunny cartoon "Wideo Wabbit" has the floor director in a panic putting up a "Please Stand By" card in front of a TV camera when Bugs disrupts and runs off Elmer Fudd's "Sportsman's Hour" show. For a while in the late 90s, Cartoon Network used a still of that as an actual "technical difficulties" card instead of a still of their logo, as was standard practice at the time.
• One episode of Megas XLR depicted Pop TV's "Technical Difficulties" card as having Megas in the process of demolishing their studio.
• This has happened several times during Kent Brockman's news reports on The Simpsons, with technical difficulties graphics that included a puppy that has pulled a plug from the wall, a bird flying into powerlines, and Kent Brockman wrapped in a straitjacket with a cuckoo clock bird coming out of his head.
  • Also happens to Krusty the Clown's show during the "Dial Z For Zombies" segment of the third Halloween Episode, with the graphic card showing a drunken cameraman.
  • All of these are accompanied by this easy-listening music piece by Alf Clausen.
• In SpongeBob SquarePants' "The Fry Cook Games", when the torch's flame is blown out by the wind, we get "PLEASE STAND BY" right before the runner brings back another, larger flame.
  • The very same "PLEASE STAND BY" screen appeared during the Patchy segments from "SpongeBob B.C.", when Patchy has an accident as stagehands appear on the set.
• In one episode of South Park a news anchor does this manually— holding a card with an image of TV static and making Fake Static with his mouth— after the man-on-the-street interview they were doing resulted in a pedophile getting airtime. The anchor does it again after the pedo somehow gets interviewed again, muttering "goddammit" and making the static noises again.
• Total Drama:
  • After Bridgette ruins her part of the talent show in "Not Quite Famous" by projectile vomiting all over the audience, Chris calls for a break to clean up. The screen that follows shows a simple animation of a grayscale, 1960's-style man ironing his shirt. The accompanying music is an instrumental rendition of "The Girl from Ipanema".
  • The contestants that went to look for help in "Celebrity Manhunt's TDA Reunion Show" reach the Celebrity Manhunt studio, where they're informed that by leaving the bus they are disqualified from participation in the next season. Eva freaks out and rampages through the studio, throwing and breaking whatever she can grab. The hosts call for the end of the episode, but it comes too late to obviate a technical difficulties screen. It's a black-and-white, Art Deco-inspired still of Blaineley getting choked by the Drama Machine while Josh looks on in melodramatic shock. The accompanying music is, again, an instrumental rendition of "The Girl from Ipanema".
  • During Chris's episode introduction speech in "Scarlett Fever", the island's malfunctioning gets worse and worse. Chris can't even finish his final sentence due to the technical difficulties and so a full-color still is put up of Chef frying a camera on his stove. The accompanying music is–you guessed it–an instrumental rendition of "The Girl From Ipanema".
• In Transformers: Animated, Soundwave started a Robot War by turning machines against humanity. When the news guy's camera bot begins chasing him, turning the broadcast into a "Jaws" First-Person Perspective shot, and just as it catches up with him we get a "PLEASE STAND BY" screen instead of the probably un-TV-Y7 fate of the newscaster.
• This happens during the Countertop intro of the VeggieTales video "The Ballad of Little Joe", when Bob and Larry are arguing on whether to tell a Bible story or a Western story, before ultimately deciding on a combination "Western-Bible story". There's also a Muzak version of "His Cheeseburger" playing (first heard in "Madame Blueberry").
• This was a Running Gag in the Ultimate Spider-Man (2012) episode "Freaky". One instance had a screen with a chibi Spider-Man holding a messed up video tape when Wolverine in Spider-Man's body slammed into the side of a building after a botched web-swing.

Real Life

• Averted with shocking result in real life with Christine Chubbuck's suicide. After she shot herself, the prevailing camera stayed focused on her while slowly fading to black. The camerawoman simply could not believe this wasn't a stunt or gag on Christine's part, but more likely because the producer of a 10am show in Sarasota in the early 70's usually didn't get a lesson on "What to do if your host shoots themselves on the air".
• Largely averted — because his news conference was not being aired live outside of the area — by the similar suicide of Budd Dwyer, a Pennsylvania Republican treasurer who was convicted of a lot of fraud charges, including embezzlement.
• Test Card F, the British test card which, as seen elsewhere on this page, has been parodied and homaged just about everywhere, really was used in cases of technical difficulties at the BBC, since it was the default image to be shown when the television transmitters were turned off or being switched over. Thus, whenever an actual technical difficulty hit the broadcast in the days of analogue TV (such as a transmitter breaking down), it was common to see Test Card F show up. The BBC's website referenced this a few years ago by having the iconic clown appear on Error 404 pages. Even as recently as 2022, this card still shows up every now and then, such as in the case of BBC Three’s impending restart, in which it was shown for around 20 minutes each night on BBC Three’s bandwidth prior to the relaunch taking place.
• One of the stranger causes of technical difficulties in the 50s and 60s was the weekly CONELRAD or EBS test. Before the two-toned attention signal was devised, stations would begin an alert by quickly switching their transmitter on and off. This was so stressful to the equipment that the procedure became known to engineers as the "EBS Stress Test".
• During times of extreme political turmoil, European radio and television stations have been known to switch to an all-classical music all-the-time format:
  • This happened most notably after the Chernobyl disaster, while officials were working out how to efficiently communicate what had just happened to the public.
  • During the failed 1991 coup in Moscow, all three Soviet TV channels were broadcasting Swan Lake, and audiences realized that something monumental was happening. Mainly because a recording of this ballet was the go-to film when one of the Soviet Premiers died. Independent Russian media broadcaster Dozhd replicated that moment when pressure from the Russian government forced them to temporarily shut down amid Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, signing off with the same Swan Lake recording.
• On 4 June 1989, what was then known as Radio Beijing began its shortwave broadcast with a brief statement that protesters in Tiananmen Square had been killed by army troops. The announcer then apologized for not being able to provide any more information or to continue the regularly scheduled broadcast and then played classical music without interruption for the rest of the hour.
  • Roughly 2005 or so, in Chinese news, there was a statement, "Censorship has relaxed in China, however, it is still present, as in the case of... (broadcast interrupted)."
• In the 60's, the NBC affiliate in Jackson, Mississippi, which was owned by an insurance company looking to deny the Civil Rights Movement was happening and protect the interests of Jackson's white business community (which was hotly opposed to the movement), would often suddenly have "technical difficulties" (and throw up a slide to that effect) whenever a network news report about the Civil Rights movement and its activities would be broadcast, and even NBC primetime programming which showed African-Americans in any positive light would suddenly be knocked off the air due to "a network problem". Many protested this, including the NBC network itself, and in 1968, the station became the first and only television station to ever have their FCC license to broadcast revoked for non-technical reasons. The new ownership group and future owners made sure the station was fair and evenhanded in their news coverage after they took control, and somehow magically fixed those "technical difficulties" permanently.
• While not quite technical difficulties per se, anyone in the USA who thought to flip through the channels as 9/11 happened (and no one can blame folks who didn't), saw that many non-news stations had some sort of card up saying they would be off the air for the rest of the day due to the events going on. Examples of this from television stations in New York can be seen here. Here's someone channel surfing on 9/11 using DirecTV. Several stations were in fact off-air, as they had been using a transmitter on the North Tower which was severed when the tower collapsed. A similar thing happened in the UK after the death of Princess Diana, as virtually every non-news channel only showed a caption stating she had died, and to switch to Sky News.
• On the day that Michael Jackson died, British network Channel Four cut out a sketch on one of its shows that was less than glamorous about the pop star. However, the announcement of him being hospitalised occurred between the original broadcast and the 1 hour delay channel. Due to this rush they accidentally put up "This programme will continue in sound only" instead of "Programmes will continue shortly".
• During the '50s and early '60s, West German TV would experience mysterious "Tonstörungen" (sound difficulties) whenever they were transmitting sports events of any kind — more precisely, whenever the East German anthem was played during the medal presentations.
• During the final speech of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu on 21 December 1989, broadcast on live television, the crowd that had "voluntarily" assembled in Palace Square in Bucharest began to boo and heckle their leader, an unprecedented event. As Ceaușescu trailed off in his speech with a look of utter disbelief on his face, the live feed quickly cut to a plain orange screen, with first picture, then sound coming back when order was (temporarily) restored and the speech could continue. (The cameras were still recording, however, and the sound of Ceaușescu resorting to pretending his microphone must be malfunctioning was captured for posterity.)
• Prairie Public Television in North Dakota experiences one during a broadcast of the British drama Heartbreak House after the tape malfunctions.
• An odd example: On Danish television channels from the early ages of TV till the 2000's, when the channels were off air, they would display the technical difficulties screen with a loud never-ending beep. Around 2007-08, due to TV stations getting better equipment, it's rare to see a single channel have it during the off-air hours. Now they are replaced with a slideshow overview of the next day of broadcasts with the TV-station's radio counterpart playing music in the background. This has mostly been because of the technical difficulty screen having next to no use, even when technical difficulties are happening, mostly with how easy it is to fix them and how it's faster to have the TV-station's narrator to explain what's up.
• A further odd example from the United Kingdom is the formerly annual Rebroadcast Standby test that was carried out by the BBC when analogue transmitters were still in use. Put simply, in the unlikely event that an individual transmitter lost all its data feeds (something that would require a pretty big disruption such as a nationwide power cut), it should have been capable of rebroadcasting on-air signals from operational transmitters, to varying levels of quality. The Rebroadcast Standby test, which would take place in the middle of the night on BBC 1 and 2 for a period of about three hours, allowed engineers to evaluate the quality of rebroadcast signals at selected transmitters by cutting off the data feeds at will. Thus, this was a case where a broadcaster was intentionally inducing technical difficulties, and anyone tuning in on an analogue signal was met with Test Card J and a creepy speaking clock. Here is an example from 2008.
• Many years before in Britain, back in The '50s, The BBC would go one better than a simple static message by showing its short "interlude films" (most famously "the potter's wheel") when there were breakdowns on set, which were frequent as most programmes (including drama) were broadcast live. (These films would also be shown during unscheduled breaks in programming, or for interludes in plays. A short feature showing some of the films can be found here. A compliation of them not regionally restricted can be found here.)
• Again, in the United Kingdom, the entire BBC suffered a major power failure on 30th June 2001, which affected the whole Television Centre knocking all its services off the air. Flipping through the BBC television channels didn't help either: all they displayed during the outage was We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties cards.
• In 1992 NBC's broadcast of the 1992 Orange Bowl was interrupted by a fire in NBC's studio. NBC was able to switch to the Japanese feed of the game. Fortunately unlike the below example, the game had been decided by that point so not much was missed in the dead time.
• On October 27, 2015 Game 1 of the 2015 World Series on Fox was knocked off the air nationally when a broadcast truck lost power. The game was off the air for about 30 seconds leaving commentators on screen referencing the incident and Fox switched coverage to that of MLB network. The situation lasted about five minutes.
  • Similarly, in 1989, pregame commentary for the World Series was knocked off the air because of a huge earthquake in San Francisco, where the game was being played ("I tell you what, we're having an earth-" *static*). After re-establishing a phone connection with the announcers, ABC filled time with episodes of Roseanne and The Wonder Years until Ted Koppel began continuous coverage from ABC News' Washington bureau (having broken into both programs previously to inform viewers of what had happened).
• The 2016 edition of A Capitol Fourth, PBS' broadcast of the White House's 4th of July celebrations, used footage of fireworks from previous years because cloudy skies in Washington made the live fireworks hard to view. PBS drew criticism from viewers for making this move but not mentioning it on camera.
  • Shortly before the 2017 edition, Kellie Pickler fell ill and was unable to attend, so pre-recorded footage from the rehearsal of her scheduled performance was shown instead, with host John Stamos announcing that the performance was a recording while the rest of the show was live.
• Dancing with the Stars has two similar examples to Pickler's (who, amusingly, is a former winner)
  • In season 21, Tamar Braxton became ill before she was to perform her week 9 dance, so dress rehearsal footage was shown in place of the live performance. She became well enough to perform a duet rumba with Nick Carter later that night, but had to withdraw anyway when she contracted pulmonary embolisms.
  • Amy Purdy suffered an injury in season 18 after performing her rumba, so the team Latin freestyle she was in was scored based on rehearsal footage.
• On October 9, 2016 Cleveland CBS affiliate WOIO experienced technical difficulties during the Cleveland Browns game against the New England Patriots. According to this article, most Cleveland sports fans that day were yelling at their TV after the game had come back on!
• This used to happen in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. If a balloon couldn't make it to the broadcast area,^note this was typically caused by high winds blowing it into something, on at least one occasion (the Bugs Bunny balloon in 1989) it was because the balloon sprung a leak and had to be withdrawn, glost pow then they would have to put on prerecorded footage of said balloon, either test footage or footage of it from a previous year, while the hosts would remind us that "we're enjoying some of our balloons on video". After no less than five instances of this in 1997, new safety measures were brought in, and only twice have they done this: in 2005 when the M&M's balloon injured two sisters, and in 2019 with the Ronald McDonald balloon.
  • For unexplained reasons, in 1992, Harry Groener and the cast of Crazy for You did not perform their selection live; rehearsal footage was shown in its stead.
• Atlanta TV station WATL once aired the movie Crash. What makes this unusual is that the opening logos were actually glitching.
• When CBS broke into their regular programming ^note (at 1:40 PM Eastern time/12:40 Central time during As the World Turns and at 11:40 AM Mountain time/10:40 AM Pacific time during a repeat of The Real McCoys) to report on the shooting of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, they only had their "Bulletin" bumper slide up as their cameras were not warmed up yet. This "technical difficulty" was never specified on-air but did occur twice. CBS eventually went live with Walter Cronkite at the top of the hour after they broke for ten seconds to allow their affiliates to identify themselves and join the network.
• Puerto Rico TV station WAPA had this happen to them during Ricardo Rosselló's resignation speech. They had been using the Governor's Facebook Live transmission to broadcast said speech when it froze just as he was about to announce his resignation. While the staff frantically tried to reload the page, the crowd at the Governor's mansion (who had been watching the speech via WAPA), began to shout in disbelief in the background. Eventually they managed to load the stream again just in time for the audience to hear Rosselló's resignation announcement.
• On September 16, 1987, one Fuji TV station in Japan had this happen during a broadcast of the Dragon Ball anime. After the commercial break concluded (complete with the beeping that signals the start of a show), the Mission: Impossible intro plays, but is then cut off midway by a grey screen followed by a technical difficulties card. Turns out a staffer had mixed up the tapes for Dragon Ball and Mission Impossible (the latter of which was scheduled to be aired at midnight). After the VTR operator managed to fix the error, the Dragon Ball episode finally began with the OP already in progress; the amount of time lost meant that the show had to jump around to the actual content of the episode, first prematurely cutting to the sponsor tag before cutting into the middle of the opening recap.
• Britain's BBC Two was meant to launch on April 20, 1964 at 19:20, but a fire at Battersea Power Station around 18:45 caused a major power outage at Television Centre and most of West London. The only thing BBC Two managed to broadcast that evening was a brief news bulletin from Alexandra Palace, and even then it had to be done again as much of it had been broadcast without sound. The rest of the evening consisted of alternating "BBC 2 will begin shortly" and "Major power failure" cards with occasional apology announcements. By 22:00 the launch had been officially postponed to the next evening, which opened with the continuity presenter blowing out a candle in reference to the power outage.
• On August 10, 1979, a technicians' strike shut down ITV in the UK, with viewers tuning in being greeted with the caption card "Independent Television: We are sorry that programmes have been interrupted. There is an industrial dispute. Transmissions will start again as soon as possible." The card stayed on air for eleven weeks until October 24, 1979, when the strike ended and programming returned.
• Actually happened at ABC during the September 24, 1977 East Coast broadcast of Scooby's All-Star Laff-A-Lympics. In the middle of the Scooby-Doo cartoon, the film suddenly froze as it became jammed in the telecine. A black screen followed, then a bumper slide of the show appeared with the ABC announcer telling kids and their parents that they were experiencing technical problems and were working to resolve it. No footage of this is known to exist.
• Whenever CITV in the U.K. used to run into technical problems, they'd play this animation of robots attempting to fix the problem. Notably, one YouTuber recalled it being played repeatedly during a botched broadcast of a youth Gladiators program, to the point when Steve Ryde came to announce the mic picked up not only him saying "CITV will be back, Monday" but also throwing down his script and walking off.
• One of the more infamous examples in British TV history happened on what turned out to be the final episode of the 1960-61 iteration of The Charlie Drake Show, "Bingo Madness". A sketch called for Drake's character to be pulled through a balsa wood bookcase, causing the shelves and contents to collapse, before being thrown through a sugar glass window... only to re-appear at the door of the set to deliver his Catchphrase, "Hello, my darlings!". Unfortunately for Drake, a well-meaning but misguided carpenter decided to nail the shelves of the bookcase in place during a break in rehearsal, so that when the cameras were rolling and Drake was pulled through the bookcase, he was knocked unconscious. Unaware of what had happened, his co-stars soldiered on, but it took two of them to throw him through the sugar glass window... and, still being out cold and unable to control his fall after being thrown through the window, he fractured his skull on the studio floor when he landed. Realising that Drake was seriously injured, the director quickly cued the closing credits even though the episode was far from over.^note  Drake recovered from his injuries, but he decided to retire from show business at the end of 1961... then changed his mind two years later and continued to work in theatre, television, and music until suffering a stroke in 1995.
• Miami NBC station WTVJ-4 and CBS station WCIX-6 swapped analog channel positions at 1 a.m. on September 10, 1995, with WTVJ moving to channel 6 and WCIX becoming WFOR-4. Viewers who were watching W27AQ, a channel 6 translator on channel 27 based in Pompano Beach^note now separately-programmed WFUN-LD on channel 20 that was fed via microwave, ended up being treated to technical issues, starting off with the actual studio-transmitter link switch from WCIX/WFOR to WTVJ being delayed long enough to allow the entirety of WFOR's first thing broadcast, a station ID, to be seen before cutting to WTVJ's live coverage of the switch, and even after the actual switch, W27AQ continued picking up WFOR's aural signal, which bled over WTVJ's aural and visual signals. (If you're wondering why they needed a translator, in the analog age, the VHF channel 6 frequency had to be broadcast from a transmitter much farther south than the other area stations and at a lower amount of power, to protect WPTV channel 5 in West Palm Beach, and what was then WCPX {currently WKMG} channel 6 in Orlando.)
• Dallas Fox station KDAF-33^note now an affiliate of The CW had its transmitter knocked out of service for 77 1/2-hours during the last week of November 1993. At 4:30 PM on a Monday afternoon during this technical difficulty, when the station was supposed to be broadcasting Animaniacs as part of the Fox Kids block, the station was forced to broadcast Dead Air instead, which, ironically, ended up attracting more viewers than independent KXTX-39's^note now a Telemundo station airing of Xuxa in the same timeslot!
• As shown on an episode of It'll Be Alright on the Night, during an airing of Another Bouquet on London Weekend Television, a staffer accidentally switched on an audio track containing a promo for The Muppet Show. From the same episode, the very next segment features a continuity announcer getting flustered and hurriedly apologising for a technical difficulty after instead of showing a preview of the prison drama Within These Walls, he accidentally loaded an advert tape featuring a high energy advert for yogurt featuring brightly-coloured animal puppets!
  Denis Norden: "Apparently, the chances of an accident like that happening are about a million to one against, which is a pity, isn't it? So mind you, when I say "a million to one", well there are places around the network where actually, you can get shorter odds."
• On October 5, 2020, a massive power outage affected CTV's Toronto headquarters for several hours, forcing half of their stations from Winnipeg eastwards, as well as their specialty channels, including CTV News Channel and TSN, off the air. By 7 PM that evening, flagship station CFTO-9 returned to the air with a rerun of The Big Bang Theory, CTV National News was hosted outside the Toronto headquarters building, and CFTO's late night newscast was produced at sister specialty channel CP24's studios and simulcast on CTVNC.
• New Zealand's South Island missed the live opening ceremony of the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics when the TV One network link between North and South Islands failed. After snow and gale-force winds cut mains power to one of the network's microwave stations near Kaikoura, the station's diesel generator failed and the backup batteries ran out before technicians could reach the station, cutting the network in two.
• On January 2, 1995, people protesting the Māori-language bulletin Te Karere being suspended over the Christmas-New Year break broke into and occupied Television New Zealand's news studio just before the 6:00pm One Network News bulletin was to go to air. TV One subsequently experienced ten minutes of technical difficulties while the police were called and the protesters escorted off the set.
• In June 2001, Indianapolis PBS station WFYI was about to start airing a PBS Kids program. Instead, a green screen accompanied by a bizarre noise was shown, and seconds later, the station went to a "please stand by" screen. This likely occurred due to severe thunderstorms that were in Indianapolis at the time.
• The original airing of the 20/20 special "My Mother's Sins" on March 23, 2019 cut to another episode about the Menendez brothers midway through the commercial break, causing outrage from viewers.
• A 1987 broadcast of High Rollers on KXAS-TV in Dallas, Texas encountered a issue wherein master control accidentally let the M&E audio track go to air.
• A humorous version was seen on GSN in the early 2000s, with the Jeopardy! Thinking Music, appropriately enough, playing in the background.
• U.S. network Qubo suffered a massive bout of technical difficulties on the night of January 12, 2021, with the E/I bug, Qubo screenbug, and TV ratings bugs glitching out at certain points during programs (even popping up during a commercial break) and the channel repeatedly going to black.
• This happened to French-language TV channel Unis TV just as they were about to show an episode of Rock Lee and his Ninja Pals, where just as the episode was about to start, the SMPTE color bars showed up, then a black screen with the program and episode titles. The episode was just delayed a little bit and nothing happened to the schedule (as the show was broadcast commercial-free.)
• "Microsoft outages" (a more detailed explanation isn't available) prevented the virtual premiere of Zack Snyder's Justice League from happening on schedule on March 15, 2021. The people who were invited to it received such messages.
• Toonami experienced technical difficulties during the March 16, 2019 broadcast of Episode 6 of Sword Art Online: Alicization, where the episode remained frozen on a still frame for several minutes, including after a commercial break. This lead to a second break shortly after, which lead to the full episode being skipped and Megalo Box, began airing ahead of schedule. However, in order to get back on schedule, instead of letting the entire episode of Megalo Box play out, it instead started over at its regular start time of 1:00 AM. Episode 6 of Alicization was re-aired in its entirety the following week on March 23, 2019, and to make up for the glitch, Episodes 7 and 8 of Alicization both aired on March 30, 2019 from 12:30 AM to 1:30 AM.
• In 2009, an NBC broadcast of a National Hockey League game between the New York Rangers and the Pittsburgh Penguins somehow managed to appear on, of all channels, Nicktoons Network, during what was supposed to be an airing of the Rugrats episode "Dust Bunnies"/"Educating Angelica". And just when things couldn't get even more bizarre, just minutes later, the channel then cut to a CatDog episode in progress, and both the network's then-current screen bug and its previous bug were on the screen at the same time.
  • According to a comment on the linked YouTube video, after the CatDog episode ended, Nicktoons Network played various (random) bumpers from its first year or two of its existence, along with logo tests without audio.
• On July 4, 2021, the annual broadcast of the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest on ESPN was marred by technical difficulties on the satellite feed with the broadcast crashing three times in the latter half of the contest, the third and final time leaving long running champion Joey Chestnut's 14th career win with 76 hot dogs eaten unseen by TV viewers.
• On 25 September 2021, a fire destroyed a control panel at UK broadcasting company Red Bee Media, knocking Channel 4 and Channel 5 off air completely. Both channels were still being run off backup systems a week later, creating numerous problems including wrong episodes of shows being aired, programmes being aired with the subtitles unavailable or the colour balance being off, the channel occasionally falling off air again, and The Last Leg (a late night chat show which is broadcast live) having to do an entire episode braced for the possibility they might fall off air at any moment.
• At some point on October 16, 2021, a ransomware attack struck mega-broadcaster Sinclair Broadcast Group, severely affecting its local television stations. This attack led to numerous issues which became apparent the following morning and lingered for days on end (with some effects still being felt well into November), including stations becoming unable to air their regularly-scheduled newscasts, those that did being forced to run them with bare-bones graphics, sports broadcasts going unaired, failure to run local commercials, and syndicated programs being replaced by simulcasts of Sinclair-owned subchannel networks or Sinclair's The National Desk, among others. While the effects also extended to Seattle radio stations KOMO-AM/FM and KPLZ, which Sinclair had just sold to Lotus Communications, the ransomware attack did not affect Sinclair's Bally regional sports networks, as well as TND, their subchannel networks, or Tennis Channel.
• Early on in its history, Spacetoon, the Arab world's pioneering children's TV network, had a call-in program named Conan on Air, wherein Amal Saad Al-Din, the Arabic voice of Conan Edogawa, would answer viewer's calls in-character. However, the popularity caused troubles for the telephone network the show was connected to, and thus on the show's final airing Spacetoon aired a notice saying the show had to be taken off the air due to technical problems.
• Direct-to-house television services, like Tata Sky in India, won't work if the company's satellite and the receiving Earth station are directly aligned with the sun due to sun rays affecting how the satellite works. Tata Sky has a specialized screen that shows up when this happens, explaining the outage and how it happens twice a year.
• An airing of CSI: New York on the UK's Channel 5 encountered major technical difficulties. After accidentally using the Milkshake! screenbug, an ad break failed to play out correctly, leaving viewers with a black screen, then a brief snippet of a Kia Soul sponsorship bumper, then more black screen until the channel put up its then-current breakdown screen, while accidentally broadcasting behind-the-scenes chatter from the technical crew in addition to the expected apology announcements.

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