On Thursday night, Sky experienced an outage that knocked out some of its Q set-top boxes, and given the spate of UK companies’ online services going down in recent weeks there was some consternation that this could be more serious.
Rest assured this was not a cyber attack. Sky Q fell over for a few hours.
And given that it only seemed to affect Q set-top boxes and not Sky Glass Gen 2 or Stream devices, the issue was specific only to Sky Q users. Sky has said that the problem was a technical issue that resulted in “some Sky Q boxes going into a standby state.”
A Sky spokesperson said: “We’re sorry some customers had trouble accessing Sky Q last night. The issue was quickly resolved, and service has been restored”. Hopefully, the Q service should be back and running as of Friday afternoon.
However, if your Sky Q box is still stuck in its standby mode, Sky’s advice is to switch it off at the power socket for 30 seconds and back on again, and that will restore the service. It’s the old switch off and back on again solution.
If you do have other issues regarding Sky Q, we’ve got FAQs for how to solve common problems as well as any connectivity issues that might occur with a Sky box.
The only slight worry with this Q box outage is that it’s not the first in recent months to affect Sky’s devices. Both Sky Glass (Gen 1) and Stream devices weren’t working but both were resolve quickly without causing too much disruption to customers.
Sky Q has been around for almost a decade at this point, and has been a solidly reliable device over its lifespan. You can read about how good we thought it is in our review, though it does appear that the future is going to be TV delivered over Wi-Fi, which makes Sky Q start to look more aged with each passing year.
But, with Sky Q you can actually record and store programmes and films on its hard-drive, which you can’t technically do with Sky Glass or Stream (despite what Sky’s protestations).
