Dish Network on Monday said it’s investigating an internal systems issue that started last week and has been impacting corporate servers and its telephone systems. Corporate communications systems, customer care functions and websites have also been affected. *Update, Dish later disclosed that a cybersecurity incident was the cause of the outage and determined certain data from corporate IT systems was taken, see more details here.
First mentioned on Dish’s quarterly earnings call last Thursday, CEO Erik Carlson said the company had experienced an internal outage that morning.
“We’re analyzing the root causes and any consequences of the outage while we work to restore the affected systems as quickly as possible,” Carlson said on February 23.
Since then Dish still has not disclosed a reason for the systems issue, which appears to be continuing into this week.
Reached by Fierce Video for comment on Monday, Dish said it’s investigating the issue currently and hopes to have more to share soon. Importantly, Dish’s pay TV services including Dish TV and vMVPD Sling TV, as well as its Boost Mobile MVNO wireless service continue to operate.
Dish shared the following statement as an update on the situation, which echoed most of what Carlson had said during last week’s earnings call:
“We experienced a systems issue with our corporate network on February 23 that is affecting our internal servers and telephone systems, and the issue is being investigated. Our DISH TV, Sling TV, Wireless services, and data networks continue to operate and are up and running,” Dish stated on February 27. “However, some of our corporate communications systems, customer care functions, and websites were affected. Our teams are working hard to restore affected systems as quickly as possible and are making steady progress.”
LightReading reported Friday after the earnings disclosure that Dish’s consumer-facing website site as well as Boost Mobile sites were down, possibly preventing customers from paying bills or making changes to service packages.
As of Monday afternoon, Dish.com still appeared down, showing a message that the company was experiencing a system issue that the teams were working to resolve, whereas the Boost Mobile website looked to be back up and running.
While Dish hasn’t yet given a reason for the issue, The Desk on Thursday cited a person familiar with the matter as saying it doesn’t appear to be connected to a cyberattack.
The outage happened just before Dish reported quarterly earnings last week, after having disclosed some preliminary metrics in SEC filings earlier this year. One the subscriber front, Dish lost around 268,000 total net pay TV subscribers across satellite and vMVPD Sling (losing around 191,000 satellite and 77,000 on Sling TV) to end the fourth quarter with 9.75 million pay TV subscribers. As of the end of 2022, Dish TV’s subscriber base stands at 7.42 million, while Sling’s subscriber tally is 2.33 million.