The Statue of Liberty temporarily went dark Tuesday night on the eve of International Women’s Day and social media users couldn’t help notice the timing, suggesting it was a salute to women.
Lights surrounding New York City’s Lady Liberty suffered an “unplanned outage” around 10 p.m. ET. Video shows the massive statue standing tall in darkness with the only light emanating from Liberty’s torch and crown.
Many took to social media suggesting the statue was cloaked in darkness in solidarity with International Women’s Day and the planned A Day Without a Woman, a call-to-action strike by women to show the “economic power and significance” that females have in the world.
“Thank you Lady Liberty for standing with the resistance and going dark for #DayWithoutAWoman,” Women’s March organizers tweeted.
“The #StatueOfLiberty has gone dark tonight. Lights off. America’s closed. #DayWithoutAWoman started early,” Alexandra Halaby tweeted.
On Wednesday, women are being encouraged to take the day off from paid and unpaid labour, avoid shopping and to wear red as a show of solidarity.
Just after midnight, the U.S. National Park Service tweeted an explanation as to why the Statue of Liberty went dark.
“Some lights on the Statue were temporarily off tonight. Likely related to new emergency generator/Hurricane Sandy recovery project work,” the agency tweeted.
Despite an official reason for the outage, social media users continues to use the Statue of Liberty as a symbol for International Women’s Day.