from Hacker News

Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage

by abe94 on 2/13/25, 1:47 PM with 147 comments

by chintan on 2/16/25, 3:56 AM
As per the Ramayana (Hindu mythology), Hanuman (the monkey God) had set the city of Lanka on fire. https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/15588/why-did-h...
Just a strange coincidence.
by pythonguython on 2/16/25, 3:22 AM
The title sounds whimsical, but animals cause a significant amount of outages. Around 5-10% are caused by animals. When I interned at a power company I saw them install “squirrel guard” insulating equipment terminals
by roncesvalles on 2/16/25, 8:51 AM
Holy clickbait. The title implies that Sri Lanka is totally out of power like Haiti, but that's far from the truth.
>Ninety-minute power cuts were implemented on Monday and Tuesday to manage demand. An investigation into the outage was being conducted by the energy ministry.
This is the extent of the "outage". It's more of a capacity reduction than a grid failure.
by picafrost on 2/16/25, 10:16 AM
BBC's 'Mammals' [0] spends a portion of one of its episodes discussing the plight of howler monkeys in Costa Rica. [1] These monkeys die frequently to electrocution as urbanization continues. The power lines look like reasonable crossing routes above the dangerous and hostile human world. The solution they implemented was to build canopy bridges safe for the monkeys.
This isn't cost efficient but it's the right thing to do. Wouldn't it be nice if we could call it the humane thing to do? In general, "humane" seems to stop with human lives, despite the fact that we like to style ourselves caretakers of this planet.
[0] https://www.bbcearth.com/shows/mammals
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5ZpLHZzWv93X70kvP2...
by DecentShoes on 2/16/25, 3:43 AM
No it didn't.
A lack of redundancy caused an islandwide outage.
by abe94 on 2/13/25, 1:55 PM
can coming into contact with a single transformer disrupt power to the entire island?
by jll29 on 2/15/25, 11:59 PM
As much as I love REUTERS, this one is incomplete: what about the monkey? And can we have a photo?
by allenrb on 2/16/25, 2:12 AM
The best line: “There were no immediate details on whether the monkey survived the incident.”
Going way out on a limb here, but perhaps the monkey who disrupted equipment carrying enough power to mess up the entire country was most likely charred into an unrecognizable state. But hey, maybe it got lucky!
by entropicgravity on 2/16/25, 5:51 AM
I presume the monkey got fried.
by xyst on 2/15/25, 11:29 PM
A real life example of a “chaos monkey”.
Folks, doesn’t matter if it’s physical or digital. Test your systems for resiliency
by nreece on 2/16/25, 1:32 AM
Related: just today came across this post on X..
"Sri Lanka will become next Bali as long as it gets fiber."
https://x.com/strzibnyj/status/1890628037529727220
by BLKNSLVR on 2/16/25, 1:49 AM
Unfortunately it's looks as if Cyber Squirrel 1* hasn't been updated since 2019.
This disruption would be one of the more successful operations.
*https://cybersquirrel1.com/
by miyuru on 2/16/25, 7:48 AM
preliminarily report for the incident is here.
https://pucsl-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/personal/chinthakal_pu...
by spike021 on 2/16/25, 12:11 AM
Not nearly the same thing but this reminds me of the Playstation game, Ape Escape. Real classic.
by swivelmaster on 2/16/25, 2:18 AM
Viral marketing for the new Oz Perkins movie is getting really out of hand!
by catlikesshrimp on 2/15/25, 11:39 PM
This happened on February the 9th - 10th
This wikipedia article was marked for deletion, so just in case https://archive.ph/wip/7fvmI
Other forums are mentioning conspiracy theories about political oponents sabotaging the current (new) government.
No skin in that game
by ForOldHack on 2/16/25, 12:41 AM
Monkey business. Shock the monkey. ooh!
by Acrobatic_Road on 2/13/25, 3:49 PM
but was the monkey alright?
by roenxi on 2/16/25, 12:53 AM
It is hard to think about Sri Lanka without recalling [0] that this is the country which recently attempted to institute a fertiliser ban. My default assumptions about their general infrastructure management are unflattering.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-d...
by cozzyd on 2/16/25, 12:31 AM
This has the hallmarks of curious George
by grg0 on 2/16/25, 1:33 AM
The monkey was a foreign nation state sponsored insider testing the nation's grid. Sri Lanka is in trouble, and authorities are mobilizing fast and expanding the surveillance state to thwart future threats before they are realized. They are deploying AI at scale.