Sri Lanka experienced a nationwide blackout after a monkey tampered with a power station south of Colombo.
Energy Minister Kumara Jayakody confirmed that the animal came into contact with a grid transformer, disrupting the system and causing widespread outages.
The blackout began around 11:00 local time (05:30 GMT) on Sunday, plunging Sri Lanka into darkness and forcing many to rely on backup generators.
Authorities prioritized power restoration for essential services like medical facilities and water purification plants, but officials cautioned that full restoration could take several hours.
The incident triggered a mix of criticism and humor on social media. Mario Nawfal, a user on X (formerly Twitter), commented, “A rogue monkey knocked out Sri Lanka’s entire power grid after triggering a total failure at a substation in Colombo. One monkey = total chaos. Time to rethink infrastructure?”
Another user, Sreeni R, shared an illustration of Hanuman, the Hindu deity depicted as a monkey, joking that Sri Lanka had “tasted monkey business” before.
In her remark, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Mirror, Jamila Husain, stated “Only in Sri Lanka can a group of monkeys fighting inside a power station cause an islandwide power outage.”
Local engineers have repeatedly raised concerns about the vulnerability of Sri Lanka’s national power grid.
On Monday, the Daily Mirror quoted a senior engineer warning that “frequent islandwide power outages may be expected if there is a disturbance even in one of our lines.”
The blackout brings back memories of the widespread power outages during Sri Lanka’s 2022 economic crisis, which further exposed the nation’s fragile infrastructure.
