The power went out at the White House, State Department, and in other parts of Washington, D.C., and suburban Maryland on Tuesday—prompting brief worries that it may have been a terrorist attack.
Those fears of terrorism were quickly assuaged, as regional utility company Pepco said the cause was a “voltage issue”—namely a power surge. The Department of Homeland Security said there was “no indication of any malicious activity” involved in the outage.
“Shortly before 1 p.m. Tuesday we experienced a dip in voltage in the Washington, D.C., area. This was caused by an issue with a transmission line. There was never a loss of permanent supply of electricity to customers,” the utility wrote in a statement, adding there aren’t any “current supply problems” and crews are “investigating the cause.”
The outage shut off lights in Metro stations, downtown buildings, traffic signals, and it even trapped people in elevators at the University of Maryland campus in College Park. Some students tweeted that people were stuck in elevators, prompting the local fire department to rescue them. Meanwhile, a photo being circulated on Twitter showed students at the university taking their final exams during the blackout, using their cellphones as lights to complete the test.
White House correspondents onsite said the power went out briefly at the building—causing the lights to dim—before it was switched over to a backup emergency generator. Other federal buildings, including the State Department and Capitol, suffered a power loss. The Smithsonian also said the blackout hit some of its museums and they were promptly evacuated.
