Viewers were stunned when the national news bulletin went down shortly before midday on Monday.
The image changed to a basic horizontal image around 11:25 a.m. Monday with the message: “ABC News will return to scheduled programming shortly.”
The broadcast was interrupted for about eight minutes, causing concern among viewers.
‘Channel 24 is dead??? It doesn’t look good,” one person wrote on social media.
More than two dozen people reported that the outage began at 11:22 on the Down Detector website.
Anyone who tuned in to the news during the eight-minute blackout period was treated to images of the Australian landscape.
Viewers were watching the ABC news bulletin when it suddenly cut off (pictured)
People at home first saw a black screen with a time code (pictured) before being shown images of the Australian landscape.
When the bulletin returned, a meteorologist was completing his forecast for the day.
“I’m fine,” he concluded, before the show continued to make news headlines.
ABC presenter Gemma Veness has apologized to viewers affected by the mysterious outage.
“We want to apologize for some of those technical difficulties that affected our newsletter, it’s good to have you back with us,” he told viewers.
An ABC spokesperson said the outage was due to a “brief interruption in the connection between our studios and the presentation service.”
They said the transmission was “quickly restored.”
ABC 24 programming has since resumed as normal.