Freely Hit By Major Outage As Viewers Lost Most Channels

If your Freely device spent the back half of this week refusing to play anything except the BBC channels, you weren’t imagining it, and there was nothing wrong with your broadband.

Between Thursday afternoon and Friday evening a large chunk of Freely’s internet-delivered channels stopped working for many viewers, leaving affected viewers staring at error code ETV6056 every time they tried to tune in.

The BBC channels carried on working throughout. Almost everything else did not.

Everyone TV says the issue is now resolved. But this one has an unusually irritating tail: for a number of people, the channels won’t properly come back until they factory reset their device – and the two main Freely box makers are giving different advice about who actually needs to do that.

Here’s what happened, what you should do now, and why this particular outage is worth more than a shrug.

• August 17 Update: Everyone TV have issued another update – turns out the problem may return even after a factory reset, if you perform certain actions on your device (such as running any of the apps – such as BBC iPlayer). See below for the full update.
• August 18 Update: The issue has been resolved (again) last night, with the cause being identified (see below). 

A Quick Freely Reminder

If you’re new to any of this, Freely is Everyone TV’s streaming platform, and Everyone TV is the same organisation behind Freeview and Freesat.

Rather than pulling channels in through an aerial or a satellite dish, Freely delivers them over your broadband connection.

You get BBC, ITV, Channel 4, 5 and 60-plus other channels in a single programme guide, with seven days of catch-up built in, and no monthly cost beyond the TV Licence.

It launched in April 2024, and for the first 18 months the only way to get it was to buy a new smart TV with Freely built in. That changed in November 2025, when the first standalone box arrived. There are now three:

• The Netgem Pleio at £99, a small puck running Android TV 14 with full Google Play Store access (my full review)
• The Manhattan Aero at £89.99, running TiVo OS, simpler, with an Ethernet port the Pleio lacks (my full review)
• The recording-capable Humax Aura EZ at £249, which is the only Freely device that can record anything

The platform passed two million monthly active users in July, and it’s the service the government is banking on as the eventual replacement for Freeview. 

What Actually Happened

The fault appears to have run from around Thursday afternoon (August 13) through to Friday evening (August 14). 

It hit both the Pleio and the Aero, and it’s reasonable to assume the Aura EZ was in the same boat. What’s less clear is whether Freely TVs were affected, and if so, which ones – more on why that might be in a moment.

It also wasn’t universal. Plenty of people sailed through the whole thing without noticing anything, while others lost everything except BBC One, Two and the rest of the BBC’s channels. Why the BBC channels stayed up while the others fell over hasn’t been explained so far.

Many of the affected users were seeing Error Code ETV6056, which Everyone TV acknowledged, but had no fix for during the early hours of the outage.

Why None Of The Usual Fixes Worked

It’s worth understanding what ETV6056 normally means, because a lot of people went looking it up this week and found something that didn’t help.

Ordinarily it isn’t a specific error at all. It’s Freely’s catch-all code for “something went wrong while watching”, and the general help page for it walks you through eight steps: check for known issues, run a speed test, update your software, check for channel line-up changes, power cycle the box, reinstall Freely, rescan, and only then – as step eight, the last resort – factory reset.

Every one of those steps assumes the fault is on your side of the internet connection. This one wasn’t. So anyone who searched the code, landed on that page and started working down the list got nowhere, and a fair few ended up at step eight anyway.

Which brings us to the frustrating part: during the outage, a factory reset appeared to work for a few minutes, and then the channels vanished again.

Manhattan, which makes the Aero, was actively advising Aero owners to hold off for that reason. Anyone who wiped their box on Thursday or Friday may have done so for nothing.

What Everyone TV Is Saying Now

Everyone TV has set up an incident page, which was updated this morning. It now carries a 15 August date, and rather than pointing you at anything to try, it goes straight to the fix:

“If you are continuing to experience the issue, you will need to carry out a factory reset on your device to restore normal service.”

Everyone TV has also apologised for the inconvenience. What it hasn’t done is explain what went wrong. Manhattan says Freely has told it the issue is resolved but that the root cause is still being investigated, so the full picture isn’t known yet.

Pleio Owners: Netgem Says Reset, Regardless

Netgem has notified every Pleio owner by e-mail, and it isn’t drawing any distinctions.

Its message states that a factory reset is required to fully restore all Freely channels – and that this applies even if your channels appeared to come back on their own.

The steps:

1. Press the gear icon on your Pleio remote, or navigate to Settings
2. Select Device Preferences
3. Select About
4. Select Factory Reset

Netgem says it takes roughly five to ten minutes, and that you’ll need to log back into your apps once it’s done.

Aero Owners: Manhattan Says It Depends

Manhattan has taken a more granular approach, and has set up a dedicated Freely status page for the issue.

Its position, based on its own testing, is that a device which was actively using Freely while the fault was live stays stuck until it’s reset, while a device that wasn’t in use during that window won’t have been affected at all.

So:

If your channels are back to normal, Manhattan says there’s nothing you need to do.

If your Aero is still missing channels or showing ETV6056, go to Settings -> System -> Factory Reset, then run through first-time setup again and sign back into Freely and your apps.

Manhattan reckons on about five minutes, and says that in its testing the channels come back and stay back.

It’s a notable split. Netgem is playing it safe and telling everybody to wipe their device whether or not they have a problem; Manhattan is telling people not to bother unless they actually do.

What A Factory Reset Actually Costs You

Worth being clear about this, because “factory reset” sounds more alarming than it is here.

On a Pleio or an Aero, there are no recordings to lose, because neither box can record in the first place. What you will lose is everything else the device has learned about you: your app logins, your settings, and your on-device watchlists and viewing history.

In practice that means signing back into BBC iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4, 5, Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max and anything else you use, one at a time, with passwords you may not have typed in months.

Not a disaster, but a truly annoying half hour if you’ve got a full set of apps on there.

One exception worth flagging: the Humax Aura EZ can record, so a factory reset on that device is a different conversation entirely. So if you’re affected, think carefully before wiping it, and check with Humax first to see if it’s absolutely necessary.

August 17 Update: Freely Warns The Problem Can Come Back

Over the weekends, we’ve heard from some Cord Busters readers who are still having issues even after doing a full factory reset. Well, turns out Freely is seeing this too – and they have issued another update.

Freely says a permanent fix is still being worked on, and that until it arrives, the problem can return even after a successful reset.

Two things in particular can trigger it: pressing Restart on a live channel, and opening one of the player apps, such as ITVX or 5.

Watching live channels straight from the TV guide works normally, so for now that’s the safest way to use your device.

It also means holding off on the player apps for the time being – including signing back into them after your reset, if you can live without them for a day or two.

If you’ve already reset your box and the channels have vanished again, that’s consistent with what Freely describes. Another factory reset should bring them back.

After that, stick to the TV guide until the permanent fix lands.

August 18 Update: The Fault Has Been Fixed

The ongoing fault behind last week’s Freely channel failures has now been resolved. According to an update posted by Manhattan, the cause was identified and fixed on Monday afternoon, and it hasn’t reappeared in testing since.

Worth saying it clearly again: this was never a problem with your individual device. Nothing is broken, and no repair or replacement is needed.

If your channels are working normally, there’s nothing left to do – and the earlier advice about steering clear of player apps such as iPlayer and ITVX, and the Restart button, no longer applies.

That guidance has been withdrawn, so you can go back to using your device as usual, apps and all.

If channels are still missing, or you’re still seeing ETV6056 or black screens, a factory reset should bring them back on both the Aero and the Pleio (let us know in the comments if it doesn’t – and contact Manhattan or Netgem).

Work is continuing in the background to prevent a repeat of these events.

The Bigger Picture: No Aerial, No Fallback

Scroll to the bottom of Freely’s own ETV6056 help page, past all eight troubleshooting steps, and there’s a section headed “If you have an aerial connected try this”.

It points out that aerial-delivered channels sit from channel 233 onwards, and that because they don’t come through your internet connection, they can still be available when an internet-delivered channel isn’t.

That is Freely’s official fallback for this exact error. And neither the Pleio nor the Aero has an aerial socket.

So the people most exposed to this outage were the ones who bought the standalone boxes – which are precisely the devices being promoted as the affordable way onto Freely without replacing your television.

Everyone TV’s own advice, when its internet channels go down, is to fall back on the aerial that its own boxes can’t use.

It may also explain the shape of the complaints. Most Freely TVs do have an aerial input, so a Freely TV owner might have carried on watching without ever registering that anything was broken.

Whether the TVs were affected at all is still unconfirmed, but that’s a plausible reason we’ve heard so much more from Freely box owners this week.

And this is the argument our readers have been making in the comments for months. Broadband outages, we’re told repeatedly, are not hypothetical – people have gone days without a connection, and with Freely that means days without television too.

Except this time it wasn’t even the broadband. Everyone’s internet was working perfectly. The platform itself broke.

In Fairness: Freeview Breaks Too

It would be dishonest to leave it there, because the aerial isn’t the fortress it’s sometimes made out to be either.

Back in April, we covered a weekend when Freeview reception was expected to go down across large parts of the UK, thanks to high atmospheric pressure bending signals and letting distant transmitters interfere with local ones.

That happens several times a year. The advice then was to sit tight and specifically not to retune, because retuning during the disruption locks your box onto the wrong signals and leaves you worse off once conditions settle.

Which, you’ll notice, is almost exactly the shape of the advice this week: don’t reach for the obvious fix while the fault is still live, because you’ll only make more work for yourself.

The difference is in how they fail, and how they recover. Freeview’s outages are regional, weather-driven and self-healing – the high pressure passes and your channels come back on their own.

This week’s Freely outage was national, invisible in cause, and for some people it doesn’t resolve until they personally wipe their device and type in a dozen passwords.

That April article ran a section headed “Freely’s Moment to Shine”, pointing out that no aerial means no weather interference, full stop, and telling Freely owners to consider it their weekend to feel smug. That was true then and it’s still true. It’s just that this week the smugness ran in the other direction.

The honest conclusion is that neither platform is bulletproof. They simply have different failure modes, and the one you notice is the one you’re relying on.

Why The Timing Matters

All of this lands in a specific window. The government’s green paper on the future of free TV set out a preferred Freeview switch-off date of December 31, 2034, with a longer option running to 2044 as the alternative it’s seeking views on.

That consultation closes at 11:59pm on August 31 – just over two weeks from now – with a decision promised later this year.

A national outage on the replacement platform, two weeks before the consultation on switching off the thing it’s replacing, is not a great look.

It’s also, in fairness, a two-day fault on a platform that has grown to two million monthly users in a little over two years, and the sort of thing that gets ironed out as a service matures.

But it’s a reminder that the resilience question isn’t just about whether your broadband stays up. It’s about what happens when the platform itself has a bad day, and whether you’ve got anything at all to fall back on when it does.

Right now, with Freely lined up to replace Freeview entirely, if you own a Freely box, the answer is not much.

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