EURO 2008 INFO

Uefa will switch to back-up diesel generators to power equipment providing the global TV feed of the remaining Euro 2008 matches including Sunday's final, after a thunderstorm in Vienna last night blacked out coverage of the Germany v Turkey semi-final.

At a press conference in Vienna today Uefa admitted that a "significant number" of broadcasters around the world had lost several minutes of second half coverage of Germany's dramatic 3-2 victory over Turkey last night and apologised to viewers.

Uefa said the blackout was caused by last night's thunderstorm in Vienna, where the Euro 2008 organiser has its media centre, and triggered a power cut in the Austrian capital's electricity grid.

European football's governing body added that a series of small power cuts caused 18 minutes of power loss to the broadcast centre transmitting last night's semi-final match, after a protection system had failed to trigger on-site back-up generators.

Three power cuts, the third instigated by Uefa itself to switch away from the Vienna power grid, caused a loss of power to its international broadcasting centre for a total of 18 minutes.

"Yesterday we were affected ... by three micro cuts, which are less than one millisecond, but this millisecond is enough to cause our master control room to reboot," said Alexandre Fourtoy, the chief executive of Uefa Media Technology.

"The protection system was defective in detecting the cuts and switching to back-up power," Fourtoy added.

He said that the company that held the contract for delivering the power supply, HBS, had a proven track record from running the systems for the 2006 football World Cup in Germany.

"This power has been fully tested according to industry procedure and it was working, as you know, perfectly well up until yesterday," Fourtoy added.

"What is important to know is that for tonight and for the final we have switched the power of the international broadcast centre to the fully redundant generator power, which also has a back up."

Fourtoy said the precaution of switching to back-up generators had been taken to avoid any "external factor" that could affect the power and therefore the transmission of the broadcast signal for tonight's Spain v Russia semi final and Sunday's final.

"The issue yesterday was purely linked to electricity. We are extremely sorry for everyone watching TV for the minutes they have missed," he added.

Another Uefa representative at the press conference today said that there was a "15% chance of rain" in Vienna tonight but "the probability of thunderstorms is zero".

Fielding questions from the floor Fourtoy, admitted that Uefa did not know how many broadcasters were affected by last night's blackout.

"We are currently debriefing with the broadcasters. We suspect it affected a significant number of rights holders," he said.

Fourtoy was also asked how many minutes of coverage were lost. "We had three cuts of power of an average of six minutes each.

"The third one was created by a manual intervention on our side to switch to generator power after the fact ... the system wasn't responding. So, three times six minutes," he responded.

He added that discussions were being held with broadcasters to see if Uefa could speed up the process of allowing them to take the live TV feed directly from the stadium for the semi-final and final if a similar blackout were to occur again.