There was a major disruption in ZDF’s online offering in particular on September 14th. The station no longer had an internet connection. “heute journal” presenter Christian Sievers (54) reports how this could happen.
Today, Thursday, September 14th, there was a “technical disruption to the internet connection” around 1:00 p.m., ZDF confirmed in a statement. As a result, the station’s media library and the “ZDFheute” online offering were only accessible to a limited extent or were no longer accessible in many places. After several hours, the problem was resolved and the station’s offers and apps could be accessed as usual again early on Thursday evening.
However, the whole thing had almost no impact on ZDF broadcasting operations. Instead of the “ZDF lunchtime magazine,” an excerpt from the “plan b” magazine was broadcast for around seven minutes. After that, the lunch format could be shown as normal. The evening before, “People Today” was omitted. However, there are no restrictions for the station’s evening program.
The children’s channel KiKA was also affected. At lunchtime, viewers were unable to receive the channel via DVB for an hour. At times there were also disruptions to ZDF programs “via DVB-T2, some cable networks and third-party platforms”.
ZDF did not disclose the reason for the failure. However, Sievers spoke up late at noon via the X platform (formerly Twitter). “Construction work in Mainz has cut off ZDF main lines and various other things,” wrote the moderator. As an update he gave “technicians have been informed”. He asked himself the question: “Let’s see how we send it later…”
