Super Bowl blackout blamed on an 'abnormality in the system'

What the Superdome control room looked like during the Super Bowl blackout

By Natt Garun February 4, 2013

Beyoncé literally shut the house down after her halftime performance at Super Bowl XLVII, but that wasn’t necessarily why the Mercedes Benz Superdome experienced a 34-minute blackout about two minutes into the third quarter. CBS, the network carrying the Super Bowl broadcast last night, released a report early this morning on why some of the stadium’s lights and electronic equipments went out.

“A piece of equipment that is designed to monitor electrical load sensed an abnormality in the system,” Superdome management companies Entergy Corporation and SMG reported in a statement. “Once the issue was detected, the sensing equipment operated as designed and opened a breaker, causing power to be partially cut to the Superdome in order to isolate the issue.”

If you watched the show like millions of your fellow Americans, you may have noticed how CBS sportscasters’ microphones cut off mid-sentence in that third quarter. CBS also put together this video package which showed what the control room looked like when power temporarily died.

Watching the Super Bowl blackout was awkward at best. Players on both the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers were sprawled out on the field doing their stretches. CBS studio commentators were basically talking out of their butts to fill in time during the delay. Coaches Jim and John Harbaugh looked grumpier than ever. When the lights came back on, there was also that stupid joke about the sportscaster plugging in his phone charger, causing the lights to go out. Viewers and advertisers, instead, took such opportunity to Twitter to make jokes at the incident, which generated 231,500 tweets per minute and several parody Superdome lights accounts. Seriously, what did people do before social media came around? We would have been so darn bored without it.

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