Sky issues urgent advice to UK homes - switch off your TV set-top box now

It's been a rough few hours for those with a box plugged into their televisions. These hugely popular set-top boxes were which saw many users suffer blank screens, frozen content and error messages. At it's peak, more than 30,000 people were complaining about the outage with some still suffering issue this morning, May 16.

Sky has now confirmed that there was an issue and has also apologised. "We're sorry some customers had trouble accessing Sky Q last night. The issue was quickly resolved, and service has been restored," a Sky spokesperson said in a message sent to Express.co.uk.

The company has also now issued advice for those still having problems, and it seems the old trick of switching things on and off again should solve the glitch.

If your Sky Q box is still stuck in standby, the advice is to switch off and wait 30 seconds. Then turn it back on again and wait for the device to reboot.

This should restore the service.

HOW TO REBOOT YOUR SKY BOX: Sky says to fully restart the Sky Q box, you users can simply press and hold the standby button on the front of the device for 5 seconds. Another option is to just unplug it from the mains for 30 seconds before plugging it back in.

It seems this tip is still relevant, as social media remains full of people complaining that they can't access content via their Sky Q box.

Within the last hour, lots of messages have been posted with a user saying, " Sky, any chance you can help with Sky Q box just shutting down and disconnecting from the TV? It seems I am not the only one trying to get help."

Anoter added, "Thousands of us can't watch anything on our Sky Q at the moment because it's down.

And one Sky customer vented, "Sky Q has been down since last night. Turned my box off and on numerous times and after 20 minutes it happens again."

We'll keep you posted on any updates but, for now, the best advice seems to be, switch off your Sky Q box at the mains, wait and reboot it.