CES Attendees Make Light of CES Blackout in Hilarious Tweets Part of the huge tech trade show filled with electricity-powered gadgets lost power yesterday.

By Lydia Belanger

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg | Getty Images

If there's an inopportune place for a power outage to occur, it's CES, an event filled with TVs, appliances and all kinds of other gadgets fueled by electricity.

Yesterday, a section of the huge Las Vegas trade show faced a blackout thanks to heavy rainfall in the desert city the day before. Oh, the irony!

Beginning at 11:15 a.m. the power went out in the Central Hall and South Hall bridge meeting rooms in the Las Vegas Convention Center. While power was restored in the South Hall within minutes, it took around two hours for the Central Hall to escape the darkness.

"A preliminary assessment indicates that condensation from heavy rainfall caused a flashover on one of the facility's transformers," the Las Vegas Visitor and Convention Authority, NV Energy and Consumer Technology Association (CTA) said in a joint statement.

While I was a few blocks away in the Sands Expo & Convention Center when it happened, I followed along on Twitter and kept my fingers crossed that other buildings would not suffer the same fate.

Attendees, exhibitors and even the CTA itself expressed a range of sentiments related to the #CESBlackout. Social media analytics company Crimson Hexagon parsed Twitter data and found that, by Thursday morning, nearly 4,200 tweets had been posted about relating to the incident. According to an email I received the company, 53.8 percent of those tweets can be characterized by joy, 18.9 percent by anger and 17.8 percent by sadness.

Related: At CES, We Found 8 Awesome Solutions to Boost Your Productivity This Year

In other words, most people got a kick out of it. That is, despite that fact that many exhibitors, who invested thousand of dollars to be at CES, lost power to their products as well as valuable face time with attendees. Some attendees even lost power themselves, such as those who were charging their phones in lockers when the outage struck and could not retrieve their devices.

Here's a sample of tweets that capture the emotions that were swirling and ways people coped during the CES blackout -- as well as a fair share of jokes to make light of the lack of light, even from brands.

And when the power was restored:
Lydia Belanger is a former associate editor at Entrepreneur. Follow her on Twitter: @LydiaBelanger.

Want to be an Entrepreneur Leadership Network contributor? Apply now to join.

Editor's Pick

Most Popular

See all
Business Ideas

70 Small Business Ideas to Start in 2025

We put together a list of the best, most profitable small business ideas for entrepreneurs to pursue in 2025.

By Eve Gumpel
Starting a Business

The Hardest Parts of Being a Solopreneur (and How I've Learned to Handle Them)

Solopreneurship is on the rise, offering us freedom and independence — but lasting success depends on tackling its unique challenges with strategy.

By Polina Beletskaya
Business News

U.S. Billionaires Are Collectively Worth About $5.7 Trillion. Here's How They Made Their Fortunes — And Surprisingly Most Are Not in Tech.

From banking to real estate, U.S. billionaires amassed their wealth in different ways.

By Sherin Shibu
Science & Technology

How AI Is Turning High School Students Into the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs

As AI reshapes education, students are turning school problems into products and building the future economy.

By Alex Goryachev
Buying / Investing in Business

Big Investors Are Betting on This 'Unlisted' Stock

You can join them as an early-stage investor as this company disrupts a $1.3T market.

By StackCommerce
Business News

Anthropic Is Now One of the Most Valuable Startups of All Time: 'Exponential Growth'

In a new funding round earlier this week, AI startup Anthropic raised $13 billion at a $183 billion valuation.

By Sherin Shibu