Folks Were Mad Online After An Ohio TV Station Cut Out Before North Carolina’s Buzzer-Beater

It took us awhile, but the NCAA Tournament finally produced some thrilling late-game excitement this weekend with Florida and North Carolina both notching incredible buzzer-beater wins. The latter of those came Sunday night, when the Tar Heels’ Luke Maye drained a long jumper with 0.3 seconds remaining in the game to give North Carolina a 75-73 win.

It was the kind of moment that defines an NCAA Tournament. Kentucky’s Malik Monk had just hit an incredible three-pointer to tie the game, and then Maye calmly knocked down the 20-footer for the win to the delight of the Tar Heels and the dismay of Kentucky fans. It was a roller-coaster of emotions no matter what side you were rooting for, but just imagine if you had watched the entire game only to miss out on the crazy ending.

That’s exactly what happened to those in the Columbus, Ohio viewing area in the closing seconds, as their feeds cut to a black screen with only a strip with a severe weather warning on top of the screen. Many of them took to Twitter to show their interrupted view of the final sequence.

10 TV tried to remedy the situation by airing the final two minutes of the game later so people could watch it, uninterrupted, but people were still upset.

They also released a statement on the matter, noting that they had a technical failure and then found themselves with a tornado warning in the area, which has the potential to be an extremely dangerous and deadly weather situation.

We had a massive technical failure in the final seconds of the NCAA basketball game between the University of Kentucky and the University of North Carolina.

Once the situation was remedied we were under a tornado warning and lives were in danger. Upon the conclusion of the warning we aired the remaining minutes of the game.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

While alerting people to a severe weather alert is critical, most stations just shrink the game or whatever else is on the screen, cut the audio and run the warning on the bottom of the screen with an audio voiceover as to not interrupt viewing. Some people were understanding of the dilemma 10 TV found themselves in while others, well, not so much.

https://twitter.com/AshleyZirkle/status/846379782262702081

https://twitter.com/Plate0fShrimp/status/846336945357819905

https://twitter.com/martinezbradj/status/846331535397699585

https://twitter.com/drnick16/status/846321614165827584

This is but a snippet of their mentions on Twitter, which have featured people mad online for the better part of 18 hours. That poor social media manager.

(h/t SB Nation)