Power failure hits Super Bowl extravaganza

New Orleans electric utility Entergy Corp. said it was not the cause of the partial loss of power and that the problem was due to an issue with the Superdome's equipment.

National Football League officials said they were investigating the outage and would provide updates as they learned more.

Moments after Baltimore's Jacoby Jones opened the second half with a 108-yard kickoff return for a touchdown that gave the Ravens a 28-6 lead early the third quarter, the scoreboard and half of the overheard lights in the Superdome went out.

Officials waved a stop to play, which abruptly short-circuited the most watched television event of the year.

When the outage began, the overhead lights first went out on the San Francisco 49ers' side of the field before dimming in other parts, although some overhead lighting remained on and kept the 72,968-seat stadium from being plunged into total darkness.

The cause of the delay was initially attributed by TV reports to an outside power feed that had died. Entergy officials said no other parts of New Orleans were affected.

“All of our distribution and transmission feeds going into the Superdome were operating as expected,” Entergy spokesman Philip Allison told KACTV in southern Louisiana. The outage appeared to originate in a failure of equipment maintained by stadium staff, he added.

Superdome spokesman Eric Eagan did not speculate on the cause of the outage, but simply said he was sorry. “We sincerely apologize for the incident,” he said in a statement on nfl.com.

The effects were also felt beyond North America, as the Super Bowl, which determines the NFL champion for the 2012 season, is broadcast live in more than 180 countries and in more than 30 different languages.

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