A scientific explanation to "service currently not available" for satellite TV

Here in Jakarta, we subscribe to Telkomvision, one of the five satellite TV providers in Indonesia. While channel surfing this morning, the TV screen suddenly went blank, and I was wondering what went wrong. The weather was fine and sunshiny - no thunderstorm whatsoever to cause the usual service disruption as we normally encounter with Astro back in Malaysia.

As I was about to flick to other channels to see if they were affected as well, out pops this message on the screen.

This translates as: The disruption of transmission for this channel is due to sun outage. This natural phenomenon happens twice a year when the satellite and the earth receiver station is in parallel alignment with the sun. Strong energy from the sun causes disruption and temporary loss of satellite signal. We apologise for any inconvenience caused, that's beyond our control. 

Needless to say, I was pretty impressed, instead of a sweeping statement "Service currently not available"