Ceefax suffers millennium bug (4 years late!)

For those of you who still use Ceefax and wondering why the pages are so out of date (ie showing information for yesterday)... there is a message on one of the subpages of Page 100 explaining the reason why the pages are out of date...

TECHNICAL FAULT DELAYS UPDATING

We apologise for the fact that a fault stopped the update of Ceefax listings pages overnight. Until this is rectified, Thursday TV listings appear on pages 631-5.

The technical fault has affected Ceefax services on both BBC1 & BBC2, and it's not just the TV listings that are affected, other pages such as Flashback (Page 579) are also affected.

So, looks like the millennium bug hit a bit late then! Not been a good start to the new year for TV companies, really!

The sky is falling I tell ye!!

hmm the TV listing pages are regional aren't they?

I doubt this is a millennium bug problem.

The TV listings pages are syndicated from PA, so I rather expect it's a problem with that.

If it were some MB problem all of Ceefax would go offline - Everything else is working just fine.

listings from Emley are fine

The radio pages are still showing yesterday's listings

Yes, the service started to come back to normal some time after I posted this topic... but I think there are still a few out of date pages (Page 579 is one of them)...

I suppose the Ceefax office isn't fully staffed today so they've only got a few people in updating things... typical that this sort of thing happens when there's very few people around!

Shame that P579 hasn't been updated, I think today would've been a rather busy day in history...

Just had a thought, seeing as this is a topic regarding problems with Ceefax, here's something from around 1994....

http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/ceefax/cx_off-air.gif

Nice!
(Note the old style Ceefax logo which they got rid of long before 1994!)

Thanks to Mike Brown for the capture.

That old Ceefax logo has been seen as late as 1999 when the whole service went down. I believe there's a screen grab on Teletext Now and Then website on mb21.

Speaking of old data. For some reason in the Central South region, the main TV Plus 130 page occassionally reverts back to the day when Victoria Beckham was due to be interviewed on Parkinson. It normally happens late in the evening, other times, the page reverts back to the correct data.

That apology message was introduced in the late 1980s. AFAIK, the reason behind its introduction was the fact that BBC Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland regularly continued broadcasting (at night) after Network transmissions had ceased. When the Network feed was shut down, the Ceefax feed went with it. So Ceefax would disappear in the Nations. When the Network signal disappeared, this apology page was broadcast.

The old Ceefax logo was never updated. Odd that it was ever included, as I believe that apology page was only introduced a year or so before Ceefax was relaunched.

I do recall a major fault that knocked Ceefax off air for at least a couple of days around 1987/1988 - and there was no apology caption then.

When ORACLE use to lose it's service, did they just revert to the clock cracker. I don't seem to remember them having an apology page as such.

I never did work out what the clock cracker actually meant in the end!

I guess if a fault is very major it may not be possible to generate such a caption