Power Outage Brings CES To a Standstill For Nearly 2 Hours

A major power outage brought a major portion of the Consumer Electronics Show in the Las Vegas Center to a standstill for nearly 2 hours today. The lights went out at around 11:13 a.m. PT, just as the second day of CES 2018 was ramping up, and didn't turn back on until around 12:34 p.m. PT. CNET reports: It came a day after more than an inch of rain fell in Las Vegas, which caused flash flooding in the desert city. (Wednesday's weather is clear and warm, and it's unclear if the power outage was at all related.) The first reports of the blackout came from the convention center's Central Hall, which houses the giant booths for show mainstays including Sony, Samsung, LG and Intel -- though Samsung's booth still had limited electricity thanks to its own private backup power. By noon, security guards were refusing entry to parts of the Convention Center. The website of Nevada Energy, the power provider, listed the cause of the problem as "customer-owned electrical equipment."

Nearly 2 hours?

[Anonymous Coward]

So now 1h 21m is nearly two hours?
Anyway, I find that hilarious, but of course I wasn't there. As long as no one was hurt, we can all laugh.

UPS Vendors..

[sycodon]

...are all now sitting there with big grins and expecting a huge increase in traffic.

Had to boot back up.

[technosaurus]

Yeah, They probably had windows upgrades pending. My last one took several hours because I disable svshost.exe's access to the internet until I want to update.

Re:

[technosaurus]

Then the spectre patches nearly bricked half the systems and they had to rollback and reboot again.

Re:

[WindowsStar]

That is exactly what I was going to ask

Re:

[Misagon]

But! ... 1h 21m is two hours in consumer electronics mathematics!
Just as 7680 is eight thousand.

Nearly 2 Hours?

[heezer7]

How about? Power Outage Brings CES To a Standstill For Just Over and Hour

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

How about? Power Outage Brings CES To a Standstill For Just Over and Hour

I see what you didn't do there!

Re:

[Chris Mattern]

"Hour and a half" would've been most accurate, since the times they give add up to 91 minutes.

Re:

[Macdude]

How about? Power Outage Brings CES To a Standstill For Just Over and Hour

Not as sensational as "Power Outage Brings CES to a Standstill for a Large Part of the Day".

Re:

[tonique]

The article's headline calls it a 2-hour blackout, so by that metric, /. editors know math a little better than CNET.

Blame

[OakDragon]

So, I guess we can blame climate change?

Re:

[AHuxley]

Cant skilled people who design complex things look back at weather records?
Rain might happen.
Design some way to get the max amount of water had happened in the past out from around networks that need protecting from water?

No UPS vendors?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess emergency power isn't needed now that everything is in the cloud.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you don't understand. They lost power, because the rain depleted all of the cloud resources.

The cloud is the problem here!

"Flash flooding" sounds like a vulnerability name

[ffkom]

... where availability is compromised by some attacker flooding your flash storage with spurious data :-)

Dem Hackers

[puddingebola]

Dem hackers sure can hack them computer systems.

Re:

[Z80a]

It was probably just some guy trying to push a core i9 past 5 ghz.

Did anyone check to see where George Clooney was?

[hashish]

Cause by rain yeah!, did anyone check to see where George Clooney was at the time?

all the backup power is for the slots and tables

[Joe_Dragon]

all the backup power is for the slots and tables

Re: I'm ashamed of you guys

[mnemotronic]

... robotic poll dancers...

huh whaaa? You're kidding, right? I never even dreamed of such a thing. Now my life seems strangely empty.

Unless it's Russian robotic poll dancers : the next phase in the war on the American voting process.

Twitter Storm

[MountainLogic]

Just looking at the president's schedule, it seems trump had 90 minutes of "executive time," just when this hit so I'' bet twitter's Nevada data center pulled down the grid due to some juvenile emotional outburst form DC.
....Or not

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

We could use a pinch

[mnemotronic]

Hasn't anyone here seen Oceans Eleven [youtu.be]?


Yea yea yea. Or forgotten it as yet another George Cloney / Brad Pitt / Matt Damon / Andy Garcia / Julia Roberts / Elliot Gould / Casey Affleck / Carl Reiner / Wayne Newton / Eydie Gormé / Angie Dickinson / Steve Lawrence vehicle.

Why so long?

[jandrese]

A preliminary assessment indicates that condensation from heavy rainfall caused a flashover on one of the facility's transformers.

But the rain had been over for nearly 20 hours at that point. Why did the water take so long to short that transformer? On the other hand it is entirely believable that the roof leaked into that transformer room, since it was leaking everywhere else in the convention center. Apparently whomever built the thing didn't understand water at all.

Re:

[Critical Facilities]

But what's strange is they're saying that condensation caused a flash event in a TRANSFORMER, not switchgear. That sounds off to me. A transformer provides plenty of heat, and I can't see how a transformer inside the building would suddenly succumb to "condensation" resulting from extended rains. If that's the case, why hasn't this happened during extended rain events prior to this?

I don't think we're getting the whole story here. Of course, I realize this is a preliminary report.

Someone check the vault in the Bellagio

[sethmeisterg]

There might be some cash missing.

Leet timekeeping skillz

[Miles_O'Toole]

"Power Outage Brings CES To a Standstill For Nearly 2 Hours"

"The lights went out at around 11:13 a.m. PT, just as the second day of CES 2018 was ramping up, and didn't turn back on until around 12:34 p.m. PT".

So power was out for an hour and 21 minutes, not "nearly 2 hours". If they weren't ready to hit the ground running when the power came back on, that's their problem.

Infrastructure

[MoarSauce123]

No wonder, electricity providers are still operating with 60s tech..if they "modernized", typically it is the same way as Edison did. How about investing in that rather than a pointless border wall?

Next Year's Star Product

[Only Time Will Tell]

I can see it now, next year's show will be filled with companies eager to show off this new product called a flashlight, where you can carry the light of the sun around in your hand where ever you go. It will be bigger than plastic!