A power outage has hit the ABC’s Ultimo headquarters, crashing the ABC News website, app and, in some cases, forcing the homepage to display stories from 2011.
The retro formatting greeted ABC readers on Wednesday morning, along with news that Julia Gillard was still the prime minister, Lady Gaga had just performed in Sydney and the Australian dollar was nearly at parity with the US.
On TV the ABC Breakfast program broadcast 15 seconds of a still image of a chicken, though it was unclear whether this was due to the power cut.
It's just not the ABC's day today.
— Ben Grubb 🐛 (@bengrubb) November 26, 2019
First the @abcnews website outage, then the @BreakfastNews opening title was a chicken for 15 seconds.
Oh dear @mjrowland68 and @LisaMillar. pic.twitter.com/fxfs83Ad9J
By 10am AEDT, the entire online news front page was down. But those who had earlier visited the main news front page saw the archived homepages.
Other users were automatically redirected to a mobile version of the site – which showed up-to-date articles but with no images and with 2011-era fonts.
But those that weren’t redirected to mobile or who manually clicked to the desktop version could glimpse a version of the site from the start of the decade.
The business front page, for example, had the headline: “Carbon, mining taxes won’t stop investment.”
On the entertainment page, readers were told that Lady Gaga had “surprised Sydney fans with two shows”. Below that was the question: “Oprah to host Oscars?”
A power outage in Ultimo has for some reason made desktop version of the @abcnews site revert to how it looked in about 2012.
— Matt Bevan 🎙 (@MatthewBevan) November 26, 2019
Tech issues has turned the @abcnews website into a time capsule. Some interesting stories from mid-2011. pic.twitter.com/JTOP8F2luf
— Maddalena Easterbrook (@mmmeasterbrook) November 26, 2019
A storm in Sydney has lead to massive power outages- and resulted in the ABC news site is down= FLASHBACKS to 2011 when Lara Giddings was the premier of Tasmania- pic.twitter.com/TBMgxwguI0
— Rachel Edwards (@paigelovesbooks) November 26, 2019
Hmmmm...looks like a web server holding the newer CSS is down, and it's reverting to an older CSS... #PropellerHat
— Michael Wyres (@mwyres) November 26, 2019
My Perth news is from 2011. A young Nat Fyfe has just signed with the Dockers until 2014.
— Writer's Bloch (@Margie_Bloch) November 26, 2019
At 10am AEDT, the front page was down entirely. An error message told readers: “WEBSITE OUTAGE. We are currently experiencing a technical outage which means we are unable to provide our usual service.”
The Ultimo building was plunged into darkness and ABC News Mornings host Joe O’Brien and many of his colleagues prepared their morning briefings in an eerie half-light.
No it’s not mood lighting. Our ABC Syd office having some power issues this morn. So those troopers @mjrowland68 and @LisaMillar are going to go through to 10am AEDT, then hopefully we’ll be up and running. @abcnews pic.twitter.com/HJcNejfbGR
— Joe O'Brien (@JoeABCNews) November 26, 2019
The ABC Radio National host Matt Bevan shared a video of the ABC’s emergency generator hard at work.
The thing keeping the ABC on air this morning. @RNBreakfast pic.twitter.com/BfTnz5hifp
— Matt Bevan 🎙 (@MatthewBevan) November 26, 2019
At 11am, the front page was back, but in a new and innovative format. It now displayed as one giant live blog – with stories as individual posts. An hour later, the website was back to normal.
ABC news website still down – so they turned the whole thing into one big liveblog.
— Naaman Zhou (@naamanzhou) November 26, 2019
But it seems hyperlinks don't work, so you have to manually scroll to find the story you wanthttps://t.co/2yUaY3ndkI pic.twitter.com/2LqnSLNuvl
A statement from the ABC said the “difficulties” were caused by “power fluctuations from our supplier overnight which impacted some of our systems”.
“Our website and the ABC News app are affected and there is currently some alternative programming on digital radio,” it said.
The ABC TV broadcast, terrestrial radio and online radio broadcasts continued as normal.
Up-to-date ABC news articles remained accessible online through their URLs or Google, but not the front page. However, these news stories displayed in the 2011 format.
