What happened

The Dominican Republic's national electricity grid suffered a complete nationwide blackout beginning around 1:20pm local time on 11 November 2025, after equipment failures at generation and transmission units in San Pedro de Macorís and Quisqueya cascaded into a collapse affecting power plants across the entire country. The outage disrupted homes, businesses, hospitals and industry nationwide, with particularly acute disruption to Santo Domingo's transportation systems; metro and cable-car passengers had to be evacuated through tunnel systems under emergency protocols, and hospitals and other major institutions relied on backup generators to maintain basic operations. State transmission company ETED said it had deployed extensive technical teams to restore service 'in the shortest time possible' without giving a specific timeline, and Energy Minister Joel Santos Echeverría confirmed the immediate deployment of sector personnel for recovery efforts. A System Failure Committee was launched to investigate the incident's causes. The blackout was described as unusual given the Dominican Republic's normally diversified generation portfolio (coal, natural gas, fuel oil, solar, wind and hydro), which typically provides redundancy against single-point failures. Power was reported restored nationwide by the following day. This is documented as an accidental equipment/cascading grid failure, not an attack.

When cited sources give different casualty, damage or spill figures for this event, they’re reported side by side above rather than merged into one number. See how confidence levels work.