World
Sri Lanka suffers nationwide blackout; cause remains under examination
Sri Lanka’s national electricity grid shut down on Saturday, causing an island-wide blackout. Early reports said the interruption had lasted more than two hours while engineers worked to restore supplies. Energy Minister Anura Karunathilaka said electricity
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From 18 October 2026 — Daily Brief
Sri Lanka’s national electricity grid shut down on Saturday, causing an island-wide blackout. Early reports said the interruption had lasted more than two hours while engineers worked to restore supplies.
Energy Minister Anura Karunathilaka said electricity would be restored in stages and asked rooftop solar owners to disconnect their systems temporarily to help stabilise the network.
Officials suspected an imbalance between solar generation and daytime demand, but had not established the technical cause. The request to disconnect rooftop systems was an operational response, not a completed investigation finding that solar power had caused the failure.
The country has encouraged rooftop solar installations that can feed electricity back into the grid. The outage raised questions about how those supplies were being balanced with demand, alongside the operation of the wider power network.
Restoration information in the initial accounts was provisional. They did not establish when every part of the country would regain power or provide a final engineering explanation of why the grid shut down.