When the lights went out at Microsoft's CES keynote Wednesday, wags quickly dubbed it the "Black Stage of Doom" -- a reference to the so-called black screen of death glitch that reportedly affected a small number of Windows 7 users last year.
Lights at the conference were quickly restored, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's presentation went off without another glitch, but that didn't stop some audience members from having a field day.
"Massively underwhelming," commented one Wired.com reader of the keynote, posting under the handle RabidAppleFanboi. "But I liked the melodramatic Black Stage of Doom, as some have described it. It added an edginess, a steely tension to the entire presentation. Would the stage be plunged into darkness again? Would this new and previously unseen form of BSOD strike twice at the very heart of CES?"
Microsoft has fended off criticism over catastrophic OS failures since the mid-1990s, though the occurrences are far less common these days. The original BSOD was the "blue screen of death," a notorious operating system crash prevalent in earlier versions of Windows. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates even saw Windows 98 crash during one of his presentations on live TV.
The company told Wired.com the temporary blackout at CES was unrelated to Microsoft's products.
"It was a problem with the hotel's HVAC system," a Microsoft representative said. "It was a silly, non-Microsoft problem that had a pretty big ramification for the keynote. That's really all it was."
Read more: Microsoft Touts Home Entertainment at CES Keynote
Wired.com's Brian X. Chen contributed to this report.
Top photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com
