Super Bowl XLVII
Super Bowl XLVII is going to be watched live on the television screens of an estimated 100 million Americans this Sunday. But, more than ever, people will also be following all the action via social media on their personal computers, smartphones and tablets. NBC

At the beginning of the third quarter of the 2013 Super Bowl Sunday, about one-half of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans went dark.

Fans booed as both the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers were advised to stay on the field and stretch, so their muscles wouldn’t tighten up. They were urged not to worry about something that they could not control.

The sportscasters calling the NFL championship game went silent, prompting Soloman Wilcots of CBS to take to the field and explain why there wasn’t any power in the stadium.

It was a period of unanswered questions and great uncertainty: Why weren’t the lights on, and how long was the outage going to last?

Before the power went out, the Ravens were leading the 49ers, 28-6.

Twitter had been abuzz, with many questioning why the 49ers former starting quarterback Alex Smith wasn’t playing in the big game.

A few minutes into the power outage, sportscasters were able to report that the lights would slowly be coming back on.

It is likely the first time that a stadium has lost power during the Super Bowl.

Some Twitter users joked that Beyonce had sucked all the power out of the Superdome with her halftime performance.

@WomensHumor joked: “Clearly #Beyonce sucked all the super out of this dome.#BeyonceBowl #SuperBowl.”

“Lol Beyonce” soon became a trending topic in the Twitterverse, as people kept joking that Queen Bey was the reason all the power had been sucked from the Superdome.

@CraZySeXyDUDE laughed: “The lights still off lol. ... Beyonce left and took the electricity with her.”

@FreshProdigy_ joked: “Lol Beyonce's performance blew out half of the stadium's electricity. Now that's #Fierce!”

@MajaPorter wrote, “Lol Beyonce was a show stopper fa real.”

@I_AM_HOTROD tweeted: “Lol Beyonce said, this program is over. #LightsOut.”

@Bee_Dottt claimed to know exactly why the power was out: “They act like they don't know what happened to the Power. Lol Beyonce shut it down!”

The game rebooted around 9:05 p.m. EST.