An hour-long outage on Armstrong cable Sunday afternoon left customers without television service, and left many Steelers fans in the dark about the Steelers-Patriots game.

Dave Whittmann, vice president of cable operations for the company, said this morning that about 4:40 p.m. Sunday there was an equipment failure at Armstrong's central facility in Zelienople. About a third of the channels and about 75,000 Butler County customers were affected.

When the equipment went down, the system attempted to automatically switch to its back-up, but for some reason that failed, Whittmann said.

A technician had to manually restore service, he said.

Some avid Steelers fans who were watching the Patriots' first scoring drive when service went out found other ways to stay tuned.

Ken Ossleborn Jr. and his father, Ken Sr., turned on the radio in their Mount Chestnut home.

Walter Wagner of Butler Township said when the screen went black, he turned to a 5-inch, black-and-white TV to get Channel 2's signal out of the air. That was the CBS affiliate station that broadcast the game,

"I started to flip channels. About half were blacked out, some were froze," Wagner said.

He said he tried to call Armstrong, but all he got was a busy signal. So he called his sister, who was "madder than a wet hen," he said. He called her to see if her cable was working.

Relief came shortly before 6 p.m. when service was restored. That was just before halftime.

Some customers reported the game could be seen on channel 72 on cable, but Whittmann couldn't explain that.

Whittmann said Armstrong "sincerely regrets the inconvenience."

The Steelers lost to the unbeaten Patriots, 34-13.