What happened

Kenya's national electricity grid experienced three separate nationwide blackouts within a roughly three-month period in the second half of 2023. The first, beginning 25 August 2023, was described as the longest blackout on record at the time, taking nearly 24 hours to fully restore; state utility Kenya Power attributed the disturbance to the country's largest wind farm, while the wind-farm operator instead blamed the transmission grid, leaving the precise cause unresolved in the reporting reviewed. A second nationwide outage the following month took engineers over 12 hours to restore. A third blackout struck on 10 December 2023, which Kenya Power attributed to a 'system disturbance' and a 'suspected fault affecting the power system,' paralyzing large parts of the country including Nairobi's main international airport and many residential districts; power was only partially restored by Sunday evening, with many areas still without electricity the following Monday morning. Following this third event, Kenya's Transport Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen formally requested a police investigation into 'possible acts of sabotage and coverup,' reflecting official concern that the recurring collapses might not be purely technical in origin, though no sabotage was confirmed in the sources reviewed. This record represents the recurring pattern of nationwide grid failures across this period as a chronic phenomenon rather than mapping each individual collapse with full technical detail.

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.