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.
