Here's the thing: NFL football games drink up a lot of electricity, and blackouts during games are not unheard of. Just two years ago, a game between the 49ers and the Steelers was delayed twice due to power outages, after a transformer exploded just outside of the stadium. It sounds like that there was a similar overload at the Superdome this year. "This is a situation totally out of our control. We have been told that there was a blown transformer," said presenter Mike Chapman. "The safety lights are on but our cameras are now up and running again." A few minutes later, the lights flickered back on, and the teams started getting ready to start the game. More details trickled in that suggested it was indeed an "outside power surge" that caused the power outage. By the time game play started over half an hour after half the Superdome went out, it remained unclear what caused the surge. It could've been lightning, but again, the weather was nice in New Orleans. More likely, is that the many very high-power electrical devices in the stadium switched on or off, sending a surge of electricity through the wires, overloading a circuit or exploding a transformer. The compressor of the Superdome's climate control system or Beyoncé's light-heavy halftime show, for instance, could cause such a surge.

Though the outage was only a half-an-hour-long, it felt like forever, mostly because the bad joking tweets didn't let up. There were some good ones, though. Writer Neil Pollack wins in our opinion, "This time, it's the rich people trapped in the Superdome."

Update, Monday morning: Entergy, the power company responsible for electricity at the Superdome, has released a statement on the Super Bowl outage, citing an "abnormality."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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