Days after the blackout of Super Bowl XLVII at in New Orleans, officials have finally identified the source of the blackout as an electrical failure caused by a faulty relay installed by the company which supplied power for the game.
Entergy New Orleans, Inc., issued a statement Friday that announced it had traced the cause of Sunday's outage to a device they had installed which was supposed to protect the equipment at the Superdome in the event of a cable failure between the switchgear and stadium.
The relay had apparently functioned without any issues before in other events such as the New Orleans Bowl, an NFL game between the Saints and Carolina Panthers, and the Sugar Bowl. However, with more than 108 million watching around the nation, the relay malfunctioned, causing power in part of the stadium to go out and suspending the game for 35 minutes.
Word spread online that the blackout was due to Beyonce's Halftime Show, as the singer performed live onstage before the power went out several minutes later.
During that time, what was starting out as a blowout for the Baltimore Ravens suddenly became a very competitive game that they had to fight until the final minutes for to win against the San Francisco 49ers 34-31.
The device was since removed for evaluation, the power company said in the statement.
However, the same day, S&C Electric Co., which manufactured the relay, issued a statement of their own putting the blame on the system operators at the Superdome, whom they said put the relay's trip settings too low, which overloaded the device.
''If higher settings had been applied, the equipment would not have disconnected the power,'' said Michael J.S. Edmonds, vice president of strategic solutions for S&C.
On the stock market, shares of Entergy, the parent company of the electrical company behind the Super Bowl, suffered as a result of the announcement, closing Friday down 0.8 percent from their original price to $64.47 share prices.
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