Baboon Didn’t Knock Power Out In Phoenix: Best Autocorrect Ever

PHOENIX, AZ — This is one of those great-if-true stories that is even greater because it isn’t. When the lights went out at Chase Field during Monday night’s big storm and delayed the Diamondbacks-Rangers game, a reporter for ESPN lit up Twitter when he tweeted “a baboon went through town and overloaded the grid, knocking some lights out.”

Now, baboons are certainly capable of such mischief. These stealth monkeys are notorious for larceny, particularly food. In fact, a baboon was blamed last year for turning off the lights in a Zambian tourist town when it wandered into a power station and started fiddling with the equipment. And the year before that, a vervet monkey in Kenya plunged the entire country into darkness.

But in this case, there wasn't any monkey business, ESPN’s Pedro Gomez explained in a follow-up tweet after the jokes ensued. Someone called it the “Best. Tweet. Ever.” Others tweeted gifs of baboon hijinks. The Phoenix Zoo even tweeted a photo of one of its baboon residents and disavowed any involvement in the blackout.

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“Haboob,” Gomez wrote of the violent, 70 mph winds that tore through the Phoenix metro. “Damn autocorrect.”

The whole thing is hilarious. Here are a few of the choice tweets:

If you want to know more about real cases in which monkeys caused power outages, read about the baboon-caused power outage in Zambia and the monkey that tripped the power grid in Kenya.

Yes, it can happen.

You can read more of the baboon-haboob Twitter stream here.

(Photo by Suhaimi Abdullah/Getty Images)