The 5 biggest blackouts of all time

Recently, Nigeria plunged into darkness on Monday, June 3rd, 2024, and the blackout persisted until Tuesday evening. The country has a long history of power grid failures but other countries have had it worse.

The Philippines has the longest documented blackout, lasting 6.3 billion hours and affecting an estimated 6.7 million people, due to Typhoon Haiyan, also known as Super Typhoon Yolanda, which caused widespread devastation and crippled the nation’s power grid, emphasising the vulnerability of infrastructure during natural disasters.

Hurricane Maria in 2017 severely damaged Puerto Rico’s infrastructure, leaving 3.4 billion hours without power and affecting over 1.5 million people for many months. The slow and uneven restoration process exposed the grid’s fragility and underscored the need for long-term resilience planning.

Auckland’s 1998 power crisis, involving cable failures, left nearly 6,000 people without electricity for five weeks. This led to residents seeking alternative accommodations and businesses implementing work-from-home policies or office relocations. The incident underscored the importance of infrastructure maintenance and redundancy planning for preventing widespread outages.

In 2019, Venezuela experienced a series of blackouts, with the most significant in March, causing 30 million people to lose power for nearly a week. This disruption disrupted essential services and economic activity.

India experienced two consecutive blackouts from July 30–31, 2012, affecting 670 million people across 22 states. The outages were attributed to excessive power demand in certain regions, highlighting vulnerabilities in India’s grid management system and the need for improved infrastructure planning.