Government blames monkey for power cut that took an entire country offline Guard at power station says he heard loud explosion and saw ball of fire.
Authorities warned of frequent power cuts over the next few days due to a breakdown, caused by the outage, at the Norochcholai coal power plant.
The Ceylon Electricity Board initially said the power cut was caused by an emergency at a substation south of the capital Colombo, without providing further details.
Later, energy minister Kumara Jayakody said a group of monkeys had jumped into the Panadura Power Station during a scuffle and one of them landed on the transmission line.
Sri Lanka plunged into darkness on Sunday as a nationwide power outage caused massive losses to businesses and wiped millions from the economy.
