The failure of several fiber optic connections caused a temporary disruption at ZDF on Thursday. ZDF announced this on Friday in Mainz in response to a dpa request. On Wednesday, a connection was damaged by excavation work on the ZDF site. This did not lead to any outages, as the system immediately and automatically switched to a second connection. On Thursday around 1 p.m. – before the already failed line was repaired – the second connection also failed.
The reason for this was damage to a line in the area around Frankfurt Airport, which was also caused by excavation work, as ZDF also announced. Work was carried out “at full speed” to repair the damage, so that the damaged connection to the ZDF site was restored early on Thursday evening. Afterwards, all ZDF offerings gradually ran smoothly again. The second connection is now available again, it was said.
Due to the technical disruption, the ZDF media library was partly unavailable on Thursday. There were also effects on the television program, as the public broadcaster announced.
The damage led to a brief change in the program at midday: instead of the “ZDF lunchtime magazine,” an excerpt from an episode of the magazine “plan b” was broadcast from 12:59 p.m. to 1:06 p.m. The “People Today” program planned for 5:45 p.m. should also be canceled. And the children’s channel was also affected. The broadcaster announced that the Kika program could not be received via the DVB distribution channels for an hour from 12:48 p.m.