Sky News DOWN: News channel goes off air at start of Mark Austin’s show from Ukraine

Sky News has gone down today for millions of viewers, with a Temporary Fault error screen being beamed to homes around the country. The outage happened just at the start of the Mark Austin News Hour as Sky were contiuing their live coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As the Sky technical issues hit Austin took to Twitter to say the issue should be resolved soon.

The Sky News presenter tweeted: “Sorry the programme was cut off abruptly from Ukraine just now . We’re all good … fire alarm in London. Back soon hopefully”.

Sky News came back on the air about 20 minutes later, with the team broadcasting from the London newsroom rather than Ukraine.

Kimberley Leonard reported from there had been a fire alarm “but we are all OK”.

The Sky issues also affected the Sky Sports News channel as well with the outage happening around 5.10pm.

Austin later revealed that Sky News’s live coverage from Ukraine would continue from 6pm.

The Sky News presenter tweeted: “We will back with you from Ukraine at 6pm all being well.”

As the rare Sky technical issues hit users took to Twitter, with some putting on their tin foil hats to speculate as to the reason of the outage.

One tweeted: “Sky News down…..not working….?”

Another posted: “Why is @SkyNews down – been down for 20 mins and counting #skynews”

One added: “@SkyNews is down hope everything’s OK”.

And another wrote: “Not a cyber attack. A fire alarm. You can put the tin foil hats down. #skynews”.

The Sky News technical issues came after Russian-backed news channel RT disappeared from all UK broadcast platforms last week.

RT was taken down mid-way through a broadcast as a wide-range of sanctions and other measures introduced in response to Russia’s war on Ukraine hit.

As part of the response sanctions have been placed on Russian banks, oligarchs as well as Vladimir Putin himself.

The UK, EU and America have all joined forces to dish out these restrictive measures. While sports teams and bodies are also helping put the pressure on Moscow, with Russia’s national football team suspended from this year’s World Cup and Russian Paralympians barred from competing in the Beijing Winter games.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has entered its 12 day today, with the UN human rights office confirming at least 406 civilians have been killed since the start of the conflict. However, the UN said the death toll is expected to be considerably higher “especially in government-controlled territory and especially in recent days.”

So far donations from generous Britons to help the people fleeing Ukraine have hit £100million.

More than 1.7million civilians have fled Ukraine since the start of the war, with the EU warning that five million could flee the conflict.