DirecTV/Direct TV customer service: Glitch is fixed

DirecTV has announced that its transmission glitch from early Tuesday morning has now been fixed.

It proved a difficult day for the satellite-TV service, whose glitch caused many of its customers to have their TVs stuck on a single channel. They flooded the company’s customer service, even misspelling the company’s name in Google searches (Direct TV instead of the correct DirecTV) in an attempt to find out what was going on.

A little before 4 p.m., however, the company was sending out a statement saying all was well for customers using its high-definition digital video recorders (HD DVRs).

“There was a transmission glitch that occurred early this morning affecting some of our HD DVRs,” the short statement read. “DIRECTV has fixed the problem and we apologize to our customers for any inconvenience this has caused them.”

Customers shouldn't have to reset their receivers, company spokesman Robert Mercer wrote in an e-mail.

There was plenty of customer inconvenience, judging by complaints on the Twitter social media site.

“Dear DirecTV: I'm gonna need you to ask permission before installing updates no one asked for, virtually breaking receivers,” wrote one customer on Twitter.

The timing of the widespread problem was unfortunate for DirecTV, which a day earlier had launched a nationwide ad campaign to promote its Whole-Home DVR Service, which allows customers to record and watch programs in up to 15 rooms using a single HD DVR.