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You might have be able to cut your finger on all the tech on the show floor, but Wednesday at CES was marred by a power cut that briefly plunged the show into darkness.
The North and Central halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center were devoid of power for close to two hours on Wednesday afternoon, with first reports emerging at around 11:15am local time.
As you’d expect, twitter lit up as the lights went down, with some noting the ‘eeriness’ of the situation:
At the @CES Samsung booth with @CNET and most of the power just went out completely. The whole Central Hall looks affected. Very eerie… pic.twitter.com/8UdE3sLhil
— Claire Reilly (@reillystyley) January 10, 2018
Turns out North and Central halls are out as well, meaning this entire convention spanning 3 huge exhibition halls and showrooms are all without power. Already seen a tweet saying they’re conducting meetings via phone flashlights. The showroom looks eerie!
— Maude Garrett (@maudegarrett) January 10, 2018
While others made light of the situation, with playful jabs at the apparent irony of the world’s busiest tech show running out of power:
Lol at all the phones being held hostage in this charging station that currently has no power and so no way of opening it #ces2018 pic.twitter.com/g7DBLeFDf5
— Mike Murphy (@mcwm) January 10, 2018
So the power went out at CES. An electronics show.
…It’s been out for a while. I’m borderline impressed at this level of irony.
Here’s a selfie at my favorite booth lol pic.twitter.com/P53wQ0P2ZM
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) January 10, 2018
But don’t worry, plenty of companies took advantage of the blackout to promote their products:
aibo, did you trip over the power cord? #SonyCES #CES
— Sony (@Sony) January 10, 2018
It didn't take long for PR companies to capitalize on the CES power outage… pic.twitter.com/N0j2AvDg6Y
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) January 10, 2018
Power down at #CES2018 good job our new MX500 SSD comes with power-loss protection! #CES pic.twitter.com/G053hH8eoK
— Crucial Memory (@CrucialMemory) January 10, 2018
Introducing Blackout™: The biggest thing to hit #CES2018 since #5G. #CESblackout pic.twitter.com/xObxxxHvQe
— Intel (@intel) January 10, 2018
Power eventually started to come back into the affected halls at around 1pm, with the show’s organisers, the CTA, saying: "A preliminary assessment indicates that condensation from heavy rainfall caused a flashover on one of the facility’s transformers. We are grateful to NV Energy for their swift assistance, to our customers and their clients for their patience and to the staff for ensuring the safety and security of all attendees and exhibitors.”
Hundreds of companies were hit by the outage, ranging from giants like Samsung and Sony to smaller startups that had forked out a small fortune to be on the show floor. This wasn’t the first unexpected stoppage to the show’s flow, with Google’s huge funhouse booth being closed by flooding. Good thing the Pixel 2 is waterproof.
Not exactly the kind of disruption we were hoping from out of CES.
