BANGOR, Maine — During the early morning hours of Tuesday, Dish Network installed new software that made receivers nationwide broadcast programs in foreign languages, a technical support person for the company said Wednesday.
In the Bangor area, programs reportedly were broadcast in Arabic and Chinese.
The technical support person, based in southwest Virginia, explained that new software was installed at 3 a.m. Tuesday that affected the language feature of customers’ receivers. He said company rules prohibited him from giving his name.
“We did have a simple issue that was corrected,” he said. “It happened in the middle of the night. Most people would have been asleep. Chances are they wouldn’t even had known” there was any problem.
Some customers were awake and called customer support and basically had to reset their receivers, the technical support person said.
A Holden couple, who asked not to be identified, said more than just the language was affected.
The husband “tried to check stocks on CNBC around 7 a.m. and it showed a man praying in what appeared to be some kind of Muslim temple,” an e-mail from the couple states. “I turned on my TV at 5:58 a.m., not in the middle of the night, and when I left for work at 8 a.m. the PROGRAMS were entirely different shows from overseas.”