Sri Lanka rushes to restore power as monkey causes islandwide outage

Six-hour power cut over weekend caused by incident in Colombo station

20250213 A monkey on power lines, Sri Lanka

A power cuts continue, the fate of the monkey that caused power chaos on Sri Lanka's grid is unknown. © Reuters

February 13, 2025 19:26 JST

COLOMBO (Reuters) -- Sri Lanka extended power cuts for a third day on Thursday as it scrambled to restore its national grid to full capacity after a monkey triggered a widespread blackout over the weekend that disrupted supply to the island's 22 million people.

An outage lasting six hours on Sunday was blamed by power minister, Kumara Jayakody, on a monkey that disrupted a grid station in a Colombo suburb. No power cuts were implemented on Wednesday, which was a holiday in Sri Lanka.