Overheating equipment forces Good Morning Britain off air

While presenters Susanna Reid and Piers Morgan discussed the upcoming Queen’s Speech with MPs Chuka Umunna and Iain Duncan Smith, the show suddenly cut out and was replaced with a black clock graphic appearing on screen.

https://twitter.com/SnowAndBeach/status/877413764798304257

Within seconds the show was back on air, with Reid apologising for the fault – only for the same thing to happen again.

Then the ITV graphic was displayed on screen while the sound was still audible…

https://twitter.com/stevedaniels90/status/877415659025694724

Worryingly, the crash also happened while the presenters were introduced to 'Sophia the robot' – which led to some viewers being very suspicious about what exactly was causing the technical problems…

https://twitter.com/piersmorgan/status/877419545128038401

However, as the presenters told the audience, the faults were due to overheating equipment at their Chiswick transmission centre.

"Apparently your seeing things on your television that we are not intending to go out on air," Reid said. “This is because apparently, the technical equipment at Chiswick in London at our transmission centre is overheating.

"Now I don’t know if that is a direct result of the very hot weather, but it is meaning that things are being put on air that we are not attending."

As Morgan delicately put it: “Basically, we’ve lost complete control and anything could happen.”

https://twitter.com/piersmorgan/status/877414080033718272
https://twitter.com/GMB/status/877417709339893761

It’s unclear if the current soaring temperatures are causing the overheating at the Chiswick centre, but if that's the case we might have a bigger problem: the affected building, Ericsson playback centre, is in control not only of ITV’s output, but of broadcasts from the likes of the BBC, Channel 4, Dave and BT Sport. We might be in for a very strange day of TV ahead...