Electricity grid suffered a major failure Thursday, plunging much of the country into blackout and slashing power output to a mere 24 megawatts, officials said, in the first such incident of the year following a similar disruption just weeks earlier.
The collapse halted operations at all 23 connected generation plants, leaving the 11 distribution companies without any supply allocations and affecting households and businesses nationwide.
Output tumbled from above 4,500 megawatts earlier in the day to the low point around 1:30 pm, according to monitoring data, though the exact trigger remained unclear as the state-owned Transmission Company of Nigeria had not released an explanation by press time.
The outage echoes a December 29, 2025, breakdown that also sparked widespread blackouts, with experts attributing recurrent failures to issues like equipment glitches, poor upkeep of lines, and unstable generation levels.
Industry voices have urged authorities and utilities to bolster safeguards against such vulnerabilities, amid persistent worries about the grid’s capacity to meet escalating demand in Africa’s most populous nation.
