Showbiz

This Morning went off air for 12 minutes and there's a bizarre conspiracy theory

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Picture:
ITV This Morning/Screengrab

On Monday the ITV magazine programme This Morning suffered a problem and temporarily went off air.

According to a statement from ITV, viewers were unable to see hosts Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby for 12 minutes.

They were instead presented with a holding screen, while a voice over announced:

Sorry for disruption on ITV. We're working hard to fix the issue and will be back in a few minutes.

Over 1,000 people registered an outage at around 11am on the website downdetector.co.uk.

The controversy surrounding the outage pushed This Morning high up the trending topics list on Twitter.

One Twitter user claimed the outage occurred while the show was discussing Brexit.

However, OK! magazine reported that it occurred while Holly and Phil were on the topic of whether or not dogs could die of broken hearts.

A spokesperson for ITV confirmed that the pair continued to present, completing an interview with Ben Fogle and then began an item about I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here! when the broadcast returned.

Fogle was on the show to discuss the broken hearted dogs topic. It turns out, they can die of broken hearts.

When the show returned Holly blamed a snake which had been on the show earlier.

At first, Phil did not realise he was back on air, saying,

All I'm seeing is people saying [on social media] we're not on. My big This Morning debut it's not even going live.

A statement from ITV sent to indy100 explained it was the fault of theBT Tower.

We would like to apologise to This Morning viewers after the programme went off air for 12 minutes today as a result of an issue at BT Tower, which affected the live feed to ITV.

We are in contact with BT to establish the cause of this issue.

More: The seven worst anti-EU conspiracy theories

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