Monkey Causes Nationwide Power Blackout in Kenya

A monkey that climbed onto the roof of Kenya’s Gitaru Power Station ended up causing a nationwide electrical blackout that lasted for over three hours Tuesday.

The Kenya Electricity Generation Company (KenGen) explained the rogue animal — who survived the ordeal — fell or jumped on top of a transformer at the hydroelectric plant, triggering the widespread outage.

“This morning, a monkey climbed on the roof of Gitaru Power Station and dropped onto a transformer tripping it,” the company wrote on Facebook. “This caused other machines at the power station to trip on overload resulting in a loss of more than 180MW from this plant which triggered a national power blackout. The system has since been restored and all our power generating units are operating normally.”

The company also apologized for the incident in its statement. “KenGen power installations are secured by electric fencing which keeps away marauding wild animals,” it wrote. “We regret this isolated incident and the company is looking at ways of further enhancing security at all our power plants.”

Following its discovery, the monkey was taken in by Kenya Wildlife Services, according to KenGen.