A portion of downtown Los Angeles fell victim to power outage Wednesday afternoon, temporarily knocking out all electricity. As luck would have it, part of the convention center was also affected, and lost all power for a second, which was enough to interrupt a lot of E3 2019’s day two programming.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power eventually confirmed that some construction problems caused the outage. Power was restored downtown soon after their initial report.
Though it was a brief and partial power outage, lights, internet routers, and even some escalators went down. Most of the demo stations on the show floor went offline, including the Borderlands 3 booth, as consoles, television monitors, and computers had to abruptly reset. People quickly took to Twitter to share their photos of their experiences.
Nintendo and Ubisoft had two ongoing livestreams at the time, which cut abruptly once the power went out. Ubisoft had been streaming a demo for the upcoming Watchdogs Legion. Fans of the Watchdogs franchise jokingly attributed the interruption to DedSec, secret hacking group from the games. Nintendo seemed prepared for the situation, quickly throwing an image up into the Treehouse Live stream featuring the character Error from Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link. Error promised the stream would resume as soon as possible.
Nintendo fans at E3 reaped the benefits of the Nintendo Switch’s hybrid abilities during the outage, as they could undock the console and continue playing without power. Despite the fact that Nintendo’s big chance to stand out and “win” E3 was yesterday with their Nintendo Direct, this situation allowed the company to show off the Switch’s handheld capabilities in action.
Though internet connections took a little longer than the power to resume, everything eventually returned to normal, and day two of E3 continued on.