ITV viewers hit by outages and issues watching live channels

ITV has apologised after an outage left some viewers with issues viewing the live channels.

Television watchers first began to report an issue at around 3pm, according to outage monitor Down Detector.

Some shared complaints on social media of distorted images and scrambled audio. Others said they couldn't view the channels at all.

According to ITV, it only affected those watching in Freeview SD and the channel was restored around 45 minutes after the problems began. ITV Hub was not impacted.

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An ITV spokesperson said: "We apologise for the reduction in picture quality experienced by viewers watching ITV on Freeview (standard definition), this afternoon.

"Service for these viewers has been restored."

Freeview confirmed the issues during the outage, writing on Twitter: "We are aware of issues with ITV channels just now. We do not have any more info as yet. We do recommend not retuning."

On a number of occasions over the past three weeks, Channel 4 and More 4 have also suffered outages.

The first instance was on September 25, when it appeared a fire at a London broadcast distribution centre caused the problem.