Do Not Adjust Your Sets

If you’re a Dish Network customer and woke up this morning telling you that your Smart Card was not authorized you were not alone.

The Internet forums lit up this morning with many Dish Network customers reporting that some of their receivers would not work and that they could not get through to Dish Network customer support.

Some posters mentioned that they were disconnected by Dish Networks phone system after being on hold for over 45 minutes. Others reported not being able to get through and getting fast busy signals.

Those who managed to get through to Dish Network CSR’s found that the CSR’s like the customers had no idea what was going on or when things would be fixed.

The Smart Card error message issue got to be so bad that Dish Network actually turned off all the encryption for all of its channels including the pay per view and adult channels while the problem was sorted out and fixed. While Dish Network customers themselves never saw any of the unscrambled channels on their receivers those with regular free to air satellite receivers we able to tune in to all the programming that Dish offers.

But the free for all didn’t last long as Dish was able to fix the issue and return its signals to a fully encrypted state.

It was also reported that customer accounts on Dish Network’s website were also messed up showing false information such as strange balances, showing a customer was signed up for auto pay when they were not and even in a few cases the last 4 digits of the credit card on file displayed was not the customers credit card.

Dish Network issued me the following statement this afternoon on the matter, ““A server failure at an uplink center overnight caused a temporary loss of programming being delivered to a small percentage of DISH Network customers. The issue was resolved quickly and those customers affected had their programming restored by morning.”

Indeed from the looks of things it appears that almost everything has gotten back to normal for Dish Network customer. The good thing about this was that it happened when most customers were sleeping or at work so not many folks noticed.

If you’re a Dish Network customer and noticed anything funky today feel free to leave your report in the comments section below.