A New Orleans Fox affiliate blames a technical glitch that interrupted Sunday’s episode of “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.”

WVUE-TV abruptly cut to a news promo, seat belt public service announcement, and commercials just as host Neil deGrasse Tyson was discussing how climate change millions of years ago influenced the primate-to-human evolutionary process.

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Commercials filled more than 5 minutes of airtime, interrupting 1 minute, 24 seconds of the program’s airtime, before “Cosmos” returned to a discussion on how the gravitational pull of other planets shaped Earth’s weather during the same period.

WVUE’s vice president and general manager, Sandy Breland, described the glitch as “an automation error.”

“It was a mistake,” Breland said. “We certainly regret the error.”

The station will re-air the episode in its entirety at 10:35 p.m. Thursday.

The episode will pre-empt regularly scheduled syndicated reruns of “Seinfeld” and “Rules of Engagement.”

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A Fox affiliate in Oklahoma City cut 15 seconds from a discussion of human evolution in the program’s March 9 premier.

KOKH-TV issued a Twitter apology for what it described as a “master control operator error.”

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