Sky TV services went down across the UK early Saturday leaving thousands of viewers unable to access live television.

The outage began shortly before 3 am and peaked just before 7 am when more than 8,000 users reported problems according to Downdetector.

Issues continued to be logged throughout the morning.

Viewers across major cities including London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Bristol, Southampton and Derby were affected.

Most complaints were linked to Sky TV services though some users also reported issues with streaming.

Around 8 per cent of reports pointed to a complete blackout with customers seeing a “no satellite signal” message on their screens.

Frustration quickly spilt onto social media with many customers criticising Sky for the lack of updates during the outage.

One viewer wrote that the disruption appeared to be national and described the service as “unacceptable” due to the silence from the company.

Another said live TV had been unavailable for hours without any explanation or apology.

Sky later confirmed the issue was caused by a technical fault affecting Sky Q and Sky+ boxes.

A Sky spokesperson said, “We are aware of a technical issue that has impacted some Sky Q and Sky+ customers, causing a ‘no satellite signal’ message to appear. This issue has now been fully resolved. Impacted customers need to restart their devices to restore service.”

The outage follows a similar incident last May when tens of thousands of Sky customers reported losing access to TV services.

At the time users said their boxes kept crashing or entering standby mode preventing them from watching live or on-demand content.

Sky said that the issue was also caused by a technical problem and was resolved shortly after being identified.