Every single day at the US Open so far, there have been dramatic incidents for fans to witness and wonder. While most of them happened on the tennis court, a particular incident on Monday happened away from the courts but ended up affecting the Billie Jean King Tennis Center.

It was widely reported that a fire alarm sounded at 3:30 pm local time in one of the buildings where the technical booth of Hawk-eye was located and as a result, the officials couldn’t use the technology on-court. Players like Daniil Medvedev and Nuno Borges, who were playing against each other on Arthur Ashe, were left confused over the incident. “Ladies and gentlemen, due to a technical difficulty with the line-calling system, we have paused the match,” the crowd was informed in an announcement.

The play was stopped during the third set of the match between Medvedev and Borges, when Medvedev was leading by 6-0, 6-1, 1-2. Caroline Wozniacki was up against Beatriz Haddad Maia at Louis Armstrong Stadium and that match also had to be stopped. The renowned journalist Jose Morgado posted about the incident on X, as he wrote “UNREAL scenes.”

The team that was running the hawk-eye system was forced to briefly evacuate, owing to the fire alarm that sounded in the technical booth. They got back in only when things settled down.

Play stopped for 10 minutes at the US Open

The incident that caused the stoppage of play lasted for nearly 10 minutes before the officials informed the chair umpires to resume play on Arthur Ashe and all the other courts. In the ongoing US Open, all the line calls are made by the Hawk-eye system and the matches couldn’t go on without the system in operation.

While the whole situation was alarming, it also caused people to come up with some hilarious reactions on how funny tennis could get sometimes. An X user who saw the lighter side of the incident wrote, “Tennis is never boring. Every day something wild happens.”

Well, it was indeed wild, but the whole tennis community would have breathed a sigh of relief that nobody suffered any damage and it was only an alarm, rather than the actual fire breaking out. The USTA clarified it in a short statement which read, “Following the determination that it was only an alarm, play was resumed.”

Following the resumption of the match, Medvedev finished off the job against Borges, as he won the third set by 6-3 to complete a straight-set victory.