12:59 - BBC Manchester (Friday 12th June 2009)

A panel of red lights suddenly blazed into life on a console in the heart of the BBC Manchester broadcast office, and was just as quickly dismissed by Output Controller Carl Greiss as console fault. There was just no way that it could have been an accurate system report and besides, it was 12:59 so it was nearly time to transfer over to the national feed for the One O'Clock News. He decided that he would report the glitch after the switch-over and turned back to his monitors.

The voice of the Broadcast Director struck up behind him with the familiar words "Transfer to Television Centre in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and switch..."

As the last word left his lips, half of the monitors in the room lost their signals and displayed only static.

"Bring it back! Adverts! Adverts!"

Greiss had already sparked into action, his hands skittering back and to along the console as he initiated an advert stream and brought control of the broadcast back to his workstation. It wasn't the first time they'd had to deal with a signal fault and they'd been trained to deal with situations like this. 'The One O'Clock News' would have to be 'The News at 1:05' today. Most viewers would just put that down to their clocks being slightly behind.

The Director was shouting instructions to the various members of staff in the room and someone was already dialing the London office to establish why the signal had disappeared, and another was already running up to the roof to check on the receiving antenna. The advert stream would buy them around five minutes to get the signal back and find out what had happened. He could hear Josh the Runner over by the phones shouting over to the Director that the London number was coming back 'unavailable'. The Director told him to try the main switchboard but the reply came back that he had, and that wasn't working either.

With the pre-set stream of adverts now running, Greiss stood up and made eye-contact with the Director, his face lined with concern.

"Sir..."

He gestured towards his console which was still lit up like a city at night.

"...we appear to have a serious situation. The London broadcast office and every single transmitter located within the M25 are reading offline."