Sky Glass and Stream UK Customers STILL Can’t Turn on their Devices UPDATE6
In a rather unusual service outage, some of Sky UK’s customers are suffering from a serious and ongoing issue that is preventing them from being able to switch-on their broadband-based Sky Glass and Sky Stream pay TV streaming devices. We can’t say we’ve ever heard of many issues quite like this one before, but hopefully the devices can be remotely recovered.
The bulk of complaints about this most bizarre of faults began to surface just before 5pm yesterday and more issues started to be reported as the night rolled on, but sadly they’re continuing to come in this morning. The reports also suggest that the issue can be quite sporadic, with some customers who own multiple ‘pucks’ (Sky Stream boxes) and Sky Glass TV sets saying that some work, while others do not.
Some customers report that their devices have since returned to normal, while many others are continuing to suffer the same problem and seeing flashing red or white lights as their devices attempt to start. The fact that this issue seemed to gradually grow last night suggests, at least to us, that Sky could have been trying to push a firmware or configuration update of some sort at the time of the incident.
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Sky soon acknowledged the issue, but there is frustration that the operator hasn’t published any further updates since late yesterday afternoon. Sky’s website currently states (here): “Some Sky Glass/Stream customers are currently experiencing technical issues when trying to switch on their devices. Our technical teams are working hard to fix this. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused and remember you can watch on Sky Go right now.”
A few customers have had some luck by unplugging their devices for 10 minutes and then re-connecting them, while others found that holding the power button down for several seconds (likely initiating a reset) worked and enabled them to re-activate their Sky Glass devices online. But others have not been so lucky and the Sky Community Forum is chocked full of complaints, suggesting this may be impacting a lot of people.
UPDATE 8:33am
We’ve seen some indications that similar devices in some of Sky’s other European outlets are suffering from the same issue, but this is not yet confirmed.
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UPDATE 8:52am
For customer who want to try and recover / reset their pucks (Sky Stream), the procedure is as follows (this works for some but not others).
Reset / Recover Sky Stream Puck
1. Switch off the Sky Stream puck at the mains plug socket.
2. Press and hold the Standby button on the bottom of the Sky Stream puck.
3. Keeping your finger on the button (underneath the puck), switch the power back on at the mains and wait until you see the LED lights flash amber then green, then remove your finger.
4. Let the Sky Stream puck complete the recovery process. This can take up to 15 minutes (may depend on your broadband speed).
5. Switch the Sky Stream puck back on and follow the on-screen steps to set it up. You might need to go to www.sky.com/activate for further steps.
Similarly, some of those with Sky Glass found that this reset worked, but again it doesn’t for everybody.
Reset / Recover Sky Glass TV
1. Switch off your TV at the mains again. There’s no need to unplug it.
2. Press and hold the Standby button on the right-hand side of the TV.
3. Keeping your finger on the button, switch the power back on at the mains and wait until you see the LED lights flash (this could take 20 seconds before the LED starts flashing), then remove your finger.
4. Let the Sky Glass TV complete the recovery process. This can take up to 15 minutes, depending on your broadband speed.
5. Switch the TV back on and follow the steps on screen to set up your TV.
UPDATE 9:06am
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Sky has just updated the Service Status message on their website, which now also pushes advice to use the reset procedure (as above).
Sky Status Update – 08:58 AM
Some Sky Glass and Sky Stream customers are currently experiencing technical issues when trying to switch on their devices. Our engineers are working hard to fix this. In the meantime please visit the links below and follow the process listed in order to restore your device. Sky Glass https://www.sky.com/help/expert/articles/power-issue-help-sky-glass Sky Stream https://www.sky.com/help/expert/articles/power-issue-help-sky-glass-sky-stream-puck We are sorry for any inconvenience caused and remember you can watch on Sky Go right now.
Sky has yet to respond to our comment request, but when they do it’ll probably mirror the ones above. But in the meantime, we must stress that the aformentioned reset/recovery process does not currently resolve the issue for everybody. In addition, if you run into an issue with PIN number acceptance, then we think this is normally the last four digits of your phone number (unless you changed it before).
Some people had to do the reset procedure a few times, usually with gaps of a few hours between attempts, before it finally worked.
UPDATE 10:01am
Sky has issued another update, albeit this time with a link that doesn’t require a staff login to work 🙂 .
Sky Status Update – 9:25am
Some Sky Glass and Sky Stream customers are currently experiencing technical issues when trying to switch on their devices. Our engineers are working hard to fix this. In the meantime please visit this link in order to restore your device – https://www.sky.com/help/articles/sky-glass-stream-wont-turn-on
We are sorry for any inconvenience caused and remember you can watch on Sky Go right now.
We’ve also had an official response from Sky, but as expected they’ve merely repeated the aforementioned statements and so there’s nothing new to add. Sky did not respond to our query about the cause possibly being an attempted firmware or configuration update.
TIP: When trying to reset the Sky Glass TV, you might need to hold the power button for up to 20 seconds.
UPDATE 23rd Sept 2024 @ 7am
Several days have now passed and, sadly, some people are still unable to restore their devices after last week’s incident. Meanwhile Sky is continuing to issue the same broad advice as before.
Sky Service Status Update
**Please be careful not to miss any of the steps as the full process requires completion to restore service** Some Sky Glass and Sky Stream customers are currently experiencing technical issues when trying to switch on their devices. Our engineers are working hard to fix this. In the meantime please visit this link in order to restore your device – https://www.sky.com/glasstv We are sorry for any inconvenience caused and remember you can watch on Sky Go right now.
The general advice is to keep trying the reset and to follow the steps at that link exactly. Many people are reporting that, after multiple attempts over several days, it did eventually work for them. But Sky’s silence over the cause and inability to provide a more detailed explanation for such a significant technical failure has caused a fair bit of understandable anger among those impacted.
UPDATE 24th Sept 2024 @ 7:13am
Sky are now saying that their “engineers have resolved this” problem, although they admit that some customers will still be experiencing problems with getting the recovery process to work. One simple but useful tip, if you have a Sky Glass TV, is to try hooking it up directly to your router via a LAN cable rather than using WiFi during the recovery process – this gets around some of the quirky issues with Sky’s WiFi that can sometimes get in the way of things.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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3 x Sky Stream Pucks all not working, continually stuck in some sort of boot loop as widely documented on forums and other outlets.
Tried the factory reset on one of those pucks but it did not resolve the issue, be interesting to see how they push new updates to devices that won’t load to a point where they are connecting to the internet.
Thats probably the reason why they have been very quite since the issue occurred, this has all the hallmarks of the Crowdstrike issue.
@Mark the Sky status update message (8:58am) both links that Sky have supplied require a Sky staff login to view
Offending links
Sky Glass https://www.sky.com/help/expert/articles/power-issue-help-sky-glass
Sky Stream https://www.sky.com/help/expert/articles/power-issue-help-sky-glass-sky-stream-puck
Still having problems with my glass . From Thursday and still not got it working. It’s not given sky a good name this is a bloody joke u can understand people leaving sky if they can’t get the service .
Ditched my Sky Stream puck after so many issues. Firstly hardware is slow, slower than VM’s Stream box. Secondly a plague of firmware bugs like “Please wait for the channel to load” even though plenty of bandwidth on gig connection and green field WiFi area with non-ISP supplied router (and others in forum plagued). Then my router switches off WiFi at 1am and begins it at 6am. It didn’t like that and always woke up with a lost connection. Oh and then some interlaced TV channels lazily encoded as 25p resulting in juddery motion. You could renumber your channel list to how you wanted but only up to 99 channels as that is all Favourites could store. Junk. Although VM’s Stream didn’t offer 4K like Sky’s box, I found it faster and better and TV channels encoded incorrectly on Sky Stream was correct on VM (QVC channels were just one example, there were others).
Frankly, rushed to market.
Tried Sky stream for a few weeks when I was evaluating the alternatives to Virgin Media in my area.
Felt very much like a beta product, the energy saving feature which you can’t turn off is also insane. If a program is paused for more than 5mins and you don’t move the remote it will put itself into standby.
Had various picture glitches on live tv with the sound & picture freezing but the audio continuing, when the picture comes back it is out of sync.
Think I’ve dodged a bullet by cancelling within the cooling off period.
It’s also laggy and a poor competition compared to apple TV and shield. If sky insist on remaining in the entertainment market, they should just release an app that caters to their customers so that we can use any hardware we like.
I’m amazed that anyone still pays for Sky these days…
Just spoke with Sky who say “the tech team are still working on the issue” no time frame given or any idea of what the problem is. Very frustrating for all!
Sky Glass is STILL not working @ 11:43. Have tried the reset multiple multiple times since yesterday afternoon. The TV does turn on and do the reset, but once it has taken 20 minutes to update, it turns itself off again!! Very very frustrated!! The sky puck upstairs is working!!
One puck failed last night and another one this morning. Both needed the reset process of removing the power then holding the standby button on the bottom of the puck for 20 seconds whilst applying the power. Both back up and running. I suspect the other two in the house will fail when used.
Sky have no idea what the puck is going on…
…
I’ll get me coat!.
Puck off with your jokes.
I’ll get my coat….
For puck sake, someone beat me to it.
Can you still leave Sky Stream before the contract end date without being charged?
Depends on your contract with them.
They have a monthly rolling contract which you can leave anytime you want, they also have yearly contracts which typically are cheaper month to month but come with termination charges if you cancel during the contract period. If you are in your 31 day cooling off period (your first month) you can also cancel during that period and not get any cancellation charges.
I don’t see why you would be able to once outside of the cooling off period.
Contract shouldn’t matter.
You are free to leave any streaming TV contract of 12 months or longer, not fully paid for in advance, with just 31 days notice, penalty free. This is as a result of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024
Well our Sky Stream is still working. We ended up with it after deciding to have the house rendered that it’d be a nice idea to get the dish off the house permanently. Also wanted my Starlink taking down so house could be rendered. To save putting the ancient dish back up, we elected to go to Stream. And, I have to say what puzzled me most about it is how catchup operates – The Stream is simply a front-end to ITVX, iPlayer et al. Which is fine, but I have an nVidia Shield that can do all that already.
At this point after having it a few months, we’ve decided that once we are out of the initial contract, we’ll be cancelling it and sending it back and just relying on other methods. We very rarely, if ever, watch television shows as they are broadcast, so what’s the point of giving Sky £33 for the privilege??
I recently tried Sky Stream myself (currently waiting for the return packaging from Sky) and concluded pretty much the same thing. I did like how it brought everything together from all the broadcast channels and streaming services in one place, but ultimately didn’t think it was worth the 2 year commitment and the extra cost over just using my Firestick with the various streaming services (including Sky’s own Now TV, which you can almost always get on an offer).
First pagers, then Walkie-talkies, now Sky stream boxes, this new era of warfare has certainly taken an interesting turn!
This is unacceptable pressing all the links, can’t activate. Won’t even let me access my account will not accept my postcode. Been trying all day can’t get through on telephone waiting 2 hours and gave up, this is a total disaster Sky will lose loads of customers. So frustrating and the links they give are useless.
But remember folks, this is the future and you should feel fine about getting rid of a sky Q box.
To be fair, they could have pushed a brick type update to all Sky Q boxes as well.
I was going to post something like that, but you have done it first. I am glad i just have a normal Tv.
I just don’t understand who would pay that amount for a TV that can’t be used unless you keep paying for Sky, but saying that looking at how much people pay for phones and other things, then maybe I should not so surprised
Sky Glass doesn’t need a Sky subscription to work as a normal TV, Ad47UK.
@Witcher, fair enough, but it still needs sky to work by the seems of it. I have never heard of a TV not being able to turn on unless there was an internal fault.
Crazy. certainy for the price of it and the TV itself is not that great.
This is a joke I have tried the reset a few times all my glass tv says your now connected let’s finished the rest of the set up been waiting an hour nothing getting fed up with sky and the prices they charge
Phones , waste of time
Resetting puck, waste of time, and if it does reset you can’t get on sky activation page .
Now been 2 days
Finally managed to activate puck but no matter what can’t get a pin to be accepted
Last weekend the Sky F1 UHD qualifying broadcast had (very) out of sync audio and the video was visibly split into quadrants. Wrong (Sky, not track) camera feeds were shown too, more than usual.
I noticed that too, especially when they were doing the Sky Pad analysis segments. It just showed random slow motion feed of other pit lane activity.
Welcome to the world of AI-controlled broadcasting. Who needs production staff?
That was affecting the UHD broadcast on NOW TV as well. I don’t think that was confined to Sky Glass/Stream.
Rebooted the TV as per instruction. Logged into sky but for some IDIOTIC reason can’t go any further. Won’t accept my postcode! Finally got though to a REAL PERSON and they said too many people logging in. Try later!
Outside of some set up issues with a three 5g router stream has been awesome exactly what it says on the tin. Works even better now I have full fiber it can be a bit sluggish but overall much better than dish sky.
It comes down to how you consume tv I like having the apps in one place but also sky sports news as well works for me
Sky,
If you are going to go so proprietary to lock down your content then put some effort in.
All you actually needed was a better Sky Go app which would be widely available to volume TVs and existing streamers.
Hold on to the those Sky Qs folks.
I am glad I got rid of sky so many years ago, has to be nearly 20 years, had it for 12 months, found I was paying for repeats. When I phoned to cancel, she said I could have a Sky+ box for free, my reply was why would I want a box to record repeats?
At least with streaming services like Disney+ and netflix, you are not locked into any contract and also don’t need to have any proprietary equipment, just a smart TV or some sort of media box/stick and broadband.
I questioned a few weeks ago whether Sky needed to be in the hardware business at all. Virtually every other streaming service is just an app on someone else’s device (smart tv, firestick etc) so why can’t Sky – except that it already does with NOW TV. I would have thought it must be possible to merge NOW TV, Sky Stream and Sky Go into a single app that runs on multiple devices.
Wish I could remember phone calls from 20 years ago and what was said. That’s nearly impressive
@Big Dave, i suppose they have more control they can give a reason for having contracts, if they were a streaming company only, then there could not really force people into a long contract.
People also think they are getting better value if they have some sort of hardware, even if it don’t belong to them. I still have my Sky box, in the loft, should dump it really.
@Tony, I don’t remember the exact words, but I remember the conversation, because it was funny, them trying to push a Sky+ box on me when I was cancelling because of repeats. Not much have changed apart from the sky-high prices they, that is another £20, then HD is another tenner more or less.
now charge. £30 a month or something like that just for the basics, if you want films, good knows how much for sport. Then to cap it off, now they don’t install dishes by all accounts so you need broadband even if you don’t want it.
Pepopl,e still pay the silly prices, up to them at the end of the day, but no wonder Sky is raking it in
My contract ends in march, at that point I’m just going to pay for netflix, disney, prime and stick a fork in it there are they cover PRETTY MUCH all the bases. Beyond that if HBO really want to sell me on House of the Dragon when it comes back in 2026(!), they’re going to have to get their act together and start offering the app in the UK.
Sky has become an inferior product with a premium price point – despite having 4K televisions throughout the house, I can only view the lacklustre offerings on one. Linear TV is on its way out anyway, and Sky knows it.
It is an absolute disgrace to wait 24hours to get sky back very disappointing it wouldn’t surprise me if it will be down for another 24hours it’s not the first time I had trouble with sky I am sure it won’t be the last
Sky glass tv is working but stuck on Network setup and will not connect to broadband . Tried several times but no joy. With EE for broadband and checked with provider and no problems and download speed is good.
The so called ‘fix’ (holding finger on button under puck etc) also doesn’t work. Tried it several time. Tried to get phone answer from Sky, total of more than 3 hours today. No answer. NOTHING on their website, no answer and no telly for min 33 hours and counting, with no apparent chance of help. Sky get NG ditched.
Called Sky yesterday as TV that morning starting showing ‘Network connection’ on blue screen, with instruction to press 4 and 6 to get remote to connect. Did it several times, with several battery changes – noghint. Tried other number comb’s shown online. Nothing.
Called Sky and spoke to guy in call centre somewhere – he suggested holding finger on bottom of puck, switching off, back on, holging finger on puck then releasing. Did it several times…nothing. The guy stated that Sky would be back on by the end of the day. I asked him if he knew that for sure and he said yes. Today – still not working. Called sky 03337583243 – same number as yesterday – spent 1 hr 5 min’s on hold and no answer. Tried calling again, no answer…not a happy bunny. The guy lied yesterday. They will know who’s calling, so probably those they know will have a genuine complaint, they won’t answer – call my cynical. NOT happy with Sky one bit…seeking other providers. Waste of time.
My sky stream is still not working after 4 days I’ve tried everything..spoken to 3 people at Sky. None of them could help as it’s an update that’s gone wrong. This is terrible service and I’ve only been a customer for 4 months. One technician I spoke to said if I had SkyQ this wouldn’t happen!I said the reason I got it was to be able to leave extortionate virgin and I can’t have a dish. Very angry!
“Its an MCC conspiracy, Thomo. Trying to prevent the home population from witnessing us Aussies wop the Pommies in the ODI . . . for a second time in a row. Too right !”
My sky puck not communicating with tv for 4th day. Can’t reach anyone at sky to TALK to, just a (sorry there is an outage etc) just not good enought. Sky texted a link to resolve the problem/ I thought there was an outage? Well needless to say it didn’t work Fed Up
Down for four days. Tried reset of puck many times simply doesn’t work. Shocking Comms from sky. An email or text would be nice. Will think hard about future. Thank goodness for fire TV as back up. No excuse for such poor Comms.
I’ve got both glass 65″ and 2 puts. All working with no problems at all. They’re all on the 1.3 version.
My issue is it won’t let me access my account and won’t accept my postcode can you cancel your SKY contract if they don’t supply the product your paying for. My sky class as been off for 6 days so far not good
I’ve been trying today(25/09)to get Sky, BBC or GB news with no luck on Skyglass today. You can channel into CNN,Euronews or France24 and if you do and swap channels to Sky, BBC or GB it kicks you out back to what you had previously on.