A DirecTV transmission glitch early Tuesday morning affecting customers' HD digital video recorders resulted in numerous complaints of set-top boxes either not responding or constantly rebooting.
"DirecTV has fixed the problem and we apologize to our customers for any inconvenience this has caused them," spokesman Robert Mercer said.
DirecTV provided a link on its homepage Tuesday that said, "Follow these steps to resolve issues you may be experiencing with your receiver."
According to the satellite operator's instructions, customers whose set-top boxes are not responding must flip down the box's front panel and hold the red button. "Be patient as the box may take up to one minute to respond to this reset," DirecTV's customer-service message said.
After the set-top reboots once, customers must hold down the red button again to reboot the box a second time, which should resolve the issue, according to DirecTV.
It was not clear how many DirecTV customers have been affected. On Twitter, dozens of messages complained about the DVR issue and several said DirecTV's customer-service phone number at 800-DIRECTV was busy.
"DirecTV, you are not impressing me today," wrote one Twitter user. "Apparently every HD DVR in the country will not stop re-booting...including mine."
According to DirecTV, the glitch Tuesday freezing DVRs was unrelated to its Whole-Home DVR service, announced on Monday.
The multiroom DVR service, available for an additional $3 per month, is supposed to let customers record and watch programs in up to 15 rooms in their home with a single HD DVR. Non-DVR set-tops are still required for each TV a customer wants to use to access the DVR recordings. The company has launched a national print, broadcast and online advertising campaign to promote the multiroom DVR service.
DirecTV, the largest U.S. direct-broadcast satellite operator, had 18.7 million subscribers as of the end of March.
