RADIANT: Alicia Keys, who sang the National Anthem, waits on the sidelines yesterday at the pregame show. (WireImage)
Somebody fumbled big time during last night’s Super Bowl.
The power at the New Orleans Superdome went out at the start of the second half of the big game — bringing a sporting event watched by some 100 million people to a screeching halt for more than 30 minutes.
The embarrassing electrical debacle bathed the field in darkness, as half the lights went out about 1 1/2 minutes into the third quarter. It also led to finger-pointing between the NFL and New Orleans power officials.
League officials blamed the surge on something “outside the field coming into the stadium,” but the local power supplier thought differently.
The energy company Entergy New Orleans threw the yellow flag back at the football league and the Superdome, tweeting: “Power issue at the Super Dome appears to be in the customer’s side. At all times, our distribution & transmission feeders were serving Superdome.”
A spokesman for Entergy said the outage appeared to originate in a failure of equipment maintained by stadium staff. And police said too much electricity was pumped into the Superdome causing a surge, while the fire department was called to investigate a smell of gas.
Auxiliary power kept the 73,000-seat stadium partially lit throughout the incident. Officials asked the crowd to stay seated throughout the outage. They did the wave to pass the time.
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Some at home took to Twitter to address the fiasco.
“I hope someone wrote down the score. . .” “Friends” star Matthew Perry tweeted.
“In hindsight, maybe installing The Clapper was a bad idea,” joked comedian Nick Toplass.
Even corporations jumped in.
“We do carry candles . . . we also sell lights,” Walgreens tweeted.
The outage came just after a high-voltage halftime show featuring Beyoncé, prompting former Dolphin quarterback and “NFL Today” analyst Dan Marino to quip that she may have caused the electrical failure.
“Beyoncé must have knocked the lights out,” Marino said.
The super blackout also knocked the power out in the CBS booth, leaving announcers Jim Nantz and Phil Simms without mics for over a minute before the station cut to commercial.
CBS sideline reporter Steve Tasker took over the duties for a few awkward segments before the power came back on.
The technical difficulty couldn’t have come at a worse moment. The Super Bowl last year drew a record-setting 111.3 million average viewers.
Players stayed loose on the field and tossed around the football as lights slowly came back on. Play finally resumed at 9:10.
Coming just after Jacoby Jones’ 108-yard touchdown return for the Ravens, the score was 28-6 in favor of Baltimore when the stadium went dark.
The outage seemed to put a spark in the until then-lifeless San Francisco 49ers, who mounted a comeback before losing 34-31.