Chaos in Asia as entire country hit by huge power cut and officials blame monkey

Power is being gradually restored across Sri Lanka after the country suffered a national outage, with authorities pointing to a surprising culprit.

The power cut disrupted water purification plants and left buildings, including hospitals in the South Asian nation, having to rely on generators, as per The BBC.

Energy Minister Kumara Jayakody reportedly blamed the power cut on an intruding monkey, claiming the animal came into “contact with our grid transformer causing an imbalance in the system”, as per the AFP news agency.

The minister said engineers “are attending to it to try and restore the service as soon as possible”.

He added that the state power entity had restored power at the national hospital and other key installations an hour after the outage.

Officials say it may be a few hours before power is restored across Sri Lanka though water purification plants and medical facilities and water purification plants have been prioritised.

The Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) said the outage was due to an emergency at a sub-station south of Colombo, without providing further details.

The electricity company said it is “making every effort to restore the island-wide power failure as soon as possible”.

Medical facilities and businesses across across the country have been getting power using inverters or generators in the meantime.

It’s not the first time the country of 22 million people has experienced widespread blackouts.

Sri Lanka faced prolonged shortages in 2022 amid a deeping economic crisis.

Shortages of fuel forced power stations to impose daily outages which lasted up to 13 hours, as per The Economic Times.