TV and radio were knocked out for a couple of hours in Switzerland on Sunday - after a squirrel got itself electrocuted. The trams stopped running too for a short time in Zurich, the venue for the squirrel-short circuit action.

Swiss TV's emergency power back-up was too puny to cope with demand - and many Swiss sports fans were left very frustrated. The outage at Switzerland's national broadcaster coincided with the closing ceremony of the Olympics and also the Formula 1 race in Valencia.

The German language site Baz.Online has a pic of the dead squirrel - and the sub-station that triggered the power cut. How can you resist? ®

Bootnote

Our thanks for the tip to Christoph Schneeberger, who writes: "People are quite upset since those channels are paid by a lot of tax francs to inform us citizens in case of catastrophic events." So how many squirrels would it need to take out Switzerland?

Related stories

• Comments Flaming squirrel nicked for blatant forgeries (27 October 2007)
• Flaming kamikaze squirrel torches car (24 October 2007)
• Old timer ices crazed squirrel with zimmer frame (15 June 2007)
• RZSL Suicide squirrel in opera-hating kamikaze bike spoke mangle (5 September 2006)
• Killer squirrel pack guts dog (5 December 2005)
• Crack-crazed squirrels terrorise South London (10 October 2005)