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A failure or outage of a traffic light, causing it to stop functioning.
Nach dem Ampelausfall mussten Polizisten den Verkehr manuell regeln.
After the traffic light failure, police had to manually direct traffic.
Commonly used in traffic management reports and news articles.
Think of 'Ausfall' as an outage; combine with 'Ampel' to picture a broken traffic light.
Compound of 'Ampel' (traffic light) + 'Ausfall' (failure, outage).
Used in contexts of road safety, municipal maintenance, and traffic news.