If it was, I wouldn't expect the government to be honest about it.

So, maybe it was....

And I assume thats pretty much how a cyber attack would work...

And yeah-we'll probably never know for sure if it was.

If it was a cyber attack, it was a damn lame one. They only got half the lights. That is no way to create panic and make a political statement.

Now, if the lights had started flashing in Morse code with the message "You are all morons, blindly following the god of consumerism while ruining this planet", then I might tend to agree with you.

My first thought was those getting money for advertising just lined their pockets with an extra half an hour of commercial time..

It looked like the start of a very bad movie to me. I was thankful when the lights came back on.

What, was it out of diesel out back or something

Ours behind the lab kicks on the first Wed. of every month automatically for a test cycle

They probably have enough of a generator to supply emergency lighting. To light that entire building takes LOTS of juice. That would be a really big generator. Instead I think they would have redundant feeds coming in from the grid, and apparently something in that area failed.

Those buildings take a LOT of juice. Not just for the lighting but also for HVAC. I don't believe they would engineer full backup for a building of that size.

And BTW, the UPS systems fail too. Even if tested regularly, the transfer systems can and do fail -- regularly.

Entergy claims their power was uninterrupted and that the problem was inside the Superdome. If that is true, then a bigger backup generator might not have helped. It all depends on where the failure occurred.

Of course we have a DC battery backup plant as welll

But is fine to run the inverters and HVAC, and A/C

as many as 4 diesels of about that capacity. With today's Cummins product, they could probably run on 2 or 3 now. But this is just a small fraction of what the Superdome requires. I had a tour through the electrical supply part of Lucas Oil Stadium and the scale of power requirements is just mind boggling.

Apropos to nothing, some data centers today are moving to fuel cells instead of diesel generators. It is expensive, but cleaner and less maintenance. They can get their energy from natural gas lines instead of having to maintain a tank of kerosene on site.

I remember we had a really bad blizzard one time at one of those data centers and we had to run 3 days solid on the diesels. We were concerned because our tanks were only good for about 4 days and it was hard to get fuel delivered under those circumstances.