NFL

When the lights went off at the Super Bowl during the big game’s infamous power outage, not everything went offline.

The stadium-wide Wi-Fi network kept working—or at least it did in some areas and for part of the outage. But it was a very old-school technology—a landline phone—that saved the day for Andrew Stern, a broadcast engineer for a San Francisco radio station.

After coming home from New Orleans, Stern gave me a rundown on how the Super Bowl’s technology held up. Was the Wi-Fi network as good as promised? Answer: yes. Did the 35-minute power outage cause problems? Answer: yes—but Stern and team found a way to manage.