On Friday morning, massive power outages hit San Francisco, New York City, and Los Angeles, as well as other American cities, causing chaos during the morning commutes for, it’s probably safe to say, millions of people.
While massive power outages on the same day certainly looks suspicious, at this time there’s no evidence besides three cities full of angry commuters that suggests that the outages were related in any way.
New York was the first city to lose power on Friday, when the 7th Avenue and 53rd Street subway station lost juice at just before 6 a.m., sending a shockwave of delays throughout the subway system (7th and 53rd is a relatively major stop with multiple train lines connecting in it). By 11:30 a.m. the NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority had the generators back up and running, but trains are expected to still be a delayed hellscape into the afternoon.
The alternative caption for this photo is “sorry, I’m sorry, we’re trying to fix it, so sorry.”
In S.F., an enormous part of the city lost power, causing Bay Area Rapid Transit trains to shut down and many businesses to close up shop. The outage began sometime around 9 a.m. in S.F., noon on the East coast, and currently has no end in sight. The entirety of the financial district, SoMa, Richmond, Nob Hill, and PAC heights are all affected.
In L.A., several areas of the city reported power outages, but the main problem appeared to be affecting Los Angeles International Airport, or LAX.
To be fair, this doesn’t look that bad.
For those lucky enough to be close to a station with wifi in NYC, things could have been worse.
Hipsters in San Francisco clung to the most important things in their lives.
Some people just gave up on the office and found someone’s house to work at — like the Inverse developers team in SF.
Not sure about the art choice over there but hey, there's the boys.
Fortunately, it was a gorgeous day in SF.
But BART being shut down definitely wasn’t fun.
The traffic maps looked like absolute hell.
Underground in SF, things started to get freaky.
But hey, SF is always down to network.
Other laid-back techies decided to play hackysack.
Plenty of businesses were affected.
But it paid off for some people, at least!
This story is developing.
