Sri Lanka suffers nationwide power outage due to monkey, know what exactly happened

Energy minister Kumara Jayakody, quoted by The Guardian, explained, “A monkey came into contact with our grid transformer, causing an imbalance in the power system.”

The blackout began around 11.00 local time (05:30 GMT) on Sunday, the BBC reported. It forced many to rely on generators, and officials noted that restoring power could take several hours.

The Ceylon Electricity Board apologised for the outage but did not clarify how a single incident led to such a widespread disruption. There was also no update on the monkey’s condition.