{"id":65011,"date":"2025-02-10T09:17:15","date_gmt":"2025-02-10T04:17:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/?p=65011"},"modified":"2025-02-10T09:17:15","modified_gmt":"2025-02-10T04:17:15","slug":"sri-lankan-monkey-causes-nationwide-blackout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/world\/sri-lankan-monkey-causes-nationwide-blackout\/","title":{"rendered":"Sri Lankan monkey causes nationwide blackout"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"template__main  flow-root  px-1 w-full sm:w-2\/3 mx-auto md:min-w-183\">\n<div class=\"story__content  overflow-hidden    text-4  sm:text-4.5        pt-1  mt-1\" dir=\"auto\">\n<p>COLOMBO: An intruding monkey at a Sri Lankan electrical grid sub-station caused a general island-wide blackout on Sunday, government officials said.<\/p>\n<p>The power outage began around 11:30 am (0600 GMT) and had yet to be fully restored after three hours.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA monkey has come in contact with our grid transformer causing an imbalance in the system,\u201d Energy Minister Kumara Jayakody told reporters.<\/p>\n<p>The intrusion took place in a south Colombo suburb, he said.<\/p>\n<p>While power was restored in some areas, it was not immediately clear how much longer the outage would last.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEngineers are attending to it to try and restore the service as soon as possible,\u201d the minister said.<\/p>\n<p>Sri Lankans had to endure months of electricity blackouts in the summer of 2022 when the country plunged into an economic crisis.<\/p>\n<p>Fuel stations ran out of petrol and diesel, forcing thermal power stations to ration electricity to 13 hours each day.<\/p>\n<p>Sri Lanka had\u00a0defaulted\u00a0on its $46 billion external debt in April 2022 after running out of foreign exchange to finance the import of food, fuel, medicines and other essentials.<\/p>\n<p>The unprecedented economic meltdown forced then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa to step down. His successor, Ranil Wickremesinghe, secured a $2.9bn bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund.<\/p>\n<p>Sri Lanka\u2019s new President Dissanayake, who defeated Wickremesinghe in elections last September, is\u00a0maintaining\u00a0the tough austerity measures introduced under his predecessor\u2019s administration and has vowed to continue the four-year IMF bailout programme.<\/p>\n<p>Dissanayake\u2019s government\u00a0concluded a long-delayed debt restructuring with both bilateral and private creditors late last year, ending Sri Lanka\u2019s status as a bankrupt nation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>COLOMBO: An intruding monkey at a Sri Lankan electrical grid sub-station caused a general island-wide blackout on Sunday, government officials said. The power outage began around 11:30 am (0600 GMT) and had yet to be fully restored after three hours. \u201cA monkey has come in contact with our grid transformer causing an imbalance in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":65012,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[26395,26396,26394],"class_list":["post-65011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-monkey-outage","tag-monkey-power-outage","tag-sri-lankan-monkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65011"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65013,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65011\/revisions\/65013"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyausaf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}