This Woman's Cable Box Showed Porn On CNN — Then It Became This Whole Big Thing

Despite news reports to the contrary, it appears the porn glitch only affected one person in Boston.

A woman in Boston who tried to watch CNN on Thanksgiving says her cable box showed her hardcore porn instead.

Twitter / Via @solikearose

Twitter user @solikearose shared several photos of her TV with BuzzFeed News, showing the programming information for Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown over the top of what was clearly not a food travel series.

"I initially posted because I wanted to see if anyone else in Boston had been affected," the Twitter user, who asked only to be identified as Rose, told BuzzFeed News.

"I think it was a broadcasting error that affected only my house," Rose said.

Rose's cable provider RCN said it had gotten no other reports of "the programming issue" with CNN.

RCN @RCNconnects

@solikearose 800-746-4726. We have not had any reports of the programming issue you mentioned on CNN in Boston. If you're still having an

Fri Nov 25 14:55:04 UTC+0000 2016

A BuzzFeed News search on Twitter also did not reveal any other Boston TV viewers who'd reported seeing porn on their CNN feeds.

"We have not had any other reports of this incident other than this single customer's tweet," Jeff Carlson, the general manager of RCN Boston, told BuzzFeed News.

A CNN spokesperson also told BuzzFeed News that there was "no interruption" of its programming in the Boston area.

But soon enough, the story had gone viral, along with the notion that it was a widespread problem affecting "viewers in Boston."

TNW / Via thenextweb.com

Dozens of news outlets including Variety, the New York Post, and Esquire ran with it. Their stories were shared thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter.

Google News

Some reports suggested that as many as 300,000 RCN subscribers may have been affected by the "epic blunder," despite only a single person having complained about the problem.

"I call shenanigans on this," said a Reddit user posting to the r/Boston subreddit. "I DVR'd the Parts Unknown Montana episode that aired at 11 last night and there is no porn in it."

Rose insists she didn't make the story up. She sent BuzzFeed News several more photos of what she said was showing on her TV instead of CNN's scheduled programming.

Twitter / Via @solikearose

"I can tell you that it's real," she said.

She also shared screenshots of her conversation with an RCN customer support agent, in which she was instructed to reset her TiVo box. Rose said her CNN channel had stopped working and that the instructions restored her service, without the porn this time.

She has since turned her Twitter account private after receiving "a lot of hateful stuff" from people who accused her of perpetrating a hoax.

"People [accused] me of faking the story and creepy men sending me dick pics and sexual messages," she said.

So, while there seems to have been a weird glitch that affected one person's cable box, it really didn't go beyond that.

NBC