Viewers were stunned when ABC’s national newscast went off the air shortly before noon on Monday.

The visual switched to the basic landscape visual at around 11.25am, with the message ‘ABC News will return to scheduled programming shortly’.

The broadcast was interrupted for approximately eight minutes, causing concern among viewers.

‘Is Channel 24 dead??? Not a good look,’ one person wrote on social media.

More than two dozen people flagged the outage on the Down Detector website from 11.22am.

During the eight-minute blackout, anyone watching the news was treated to images of the Australian landscape.

Viewers were watching the ABC newscast when it suddenly cut off (pictured)

A time-coded black screen (pictured) was first seen before people in the house were shown images of the Australian landscape.

When the bulletin returned, a weather forecaster was finalizing his forecast for the day.

He concluded his words by saying “I’m staying well” before the program moved on to the news headlines.

ABC presenter Gemma Veness has apologized to viewers affected by the mysterious outage.

“We would like to apologize here for some technical glitches affecting our newsletter, it is great to have you back,” he told the audience.

A spokesperson for the ABC said the outage was due to ‘a brief interruption in the connection between our studios and our presenting service’.

They said the feed was ‘quickly restored’.

ABC 24 programming has continued as normal since then.