Al Jazeera blames hackers for World Cup interruption

The channel blamed hackers for interruptions to the first two days of its World Cup coverage.

DUBAI // Al Jazeera Sport's World Cup broadcasts were interrupted for a second straight day yesterday - glitches the satellite broadcaster blamed on hackers. The Argentina versus Nigeria match yesterday blacked out for minutes at a time, disappeared entirely from one channel, and suffered from pixellation and distortion. On Friday, the broadcast experienced disruptions for most of the first half of the 2010 World Cup's opening match between Mexico and South Africa.

Football aficionados in cafes and hotels from Al Ain to Dubai were perplexed by problems, which at one point saw play-by-play commentary switch from English to French. Broadcasters issued an on-air apology for the issues at halftime of the Argentina-Nigeria match, and later the feed had a scrolling message telling viewers to retune to alternate satellite channels. Officials at Al Jazeera Sports said saboteurs somehow altered the feed.

The company said in a statement it did not know the identities of the perpetrators, but Nasser al Khalifi, its chairman, vowed yesterday to "go after whoever has caused this terrible act" and that the perpetrators would be found out "very soon". A telecommunications industry analyst in the United States, Jeff Kagan, said that would be a virtually impossible. "When the company says the bad guys have done this, they really have no idea who hacked in," he said.

"They're just saying what they think. The people hacked into the system and took control, and then they hacked out. The signal they used to gain control could have come from anywhere in the world." Officials at Al Jazeera have estimated that roughly 85 million viewers tuned into its coverage of Friday's match, although it is not certain how many were affected by the technical difficulties. Al Jazeera's director of communications, Satnam Matharu, declined to discuss the issue yesterday. Mr Kagan said television networks that run digital operations must be prepared attacks by increasingly sophisticated hackers. "Everything's running on computers," he said. "Cell phones today are all run by computer and they can all be hacked into, and increasingly such things will become a big target for these bad guys. "This is a warning and the networks will come in with virus protection. It's a constant battle, one in which these guy are trying to one-up each other, and it keeps going up and up." Viewers yesterday were not only left disappointed by the disruptions. At least for those who paid an additional Dh295 to Dh384 to obtain Al Jazeera's World Cup channels, the problems were expensive moments that were lost and also not likely to be refunded. Anecdotal evidence of the widespread problems would suggest that refunds could be expensive for Al Jazeera. In a statement on Saturday, the Qatar-based network, which has exclusive rights on World Cup football coverage in the region, said that this "loss of signal was completely beyond Al Jazeera Sport's control and they share in the frustrations of all those whose enjoyment was spoiled by what was a deliberate act of sabotage". On Friday, Al Jazeera announced it would also broadcast World Cup games on free-to-air channels, in addition to pay-per-view.