At about 8:45pm on Friday (1 February 2008), the city of Cape Town was plunged into darkness. I was unfortunate to be in Cape Town at that time. I initially thought that it was a matter of load shedding in the area I was in. But after receiving several phone calls and text messages from people in Cape Town, all of them were saying that they are also plunged into darkness. I thought to myself that this could not be correct and something must be wrong.

I waited and waited and thought that the power would come back after 2 hours, as 2 hours has been what we are used to in load shedding. Two hours passed and still we will in darkness. I gave up hope on waiting up for the electricity and decided to go to bed. I awoke on Saturday morning and luckily there was electricity now.

I now gather from reports that the power on came back at 2:30am on Saturday and that there was actually some technical fault that caused the whole of Cape Town to be in darkness on Friday night. Reports say a snapped earth wire feeding into a major substation caused the outage.

I feel sorry for all those who had come to Cape Town to have a good Friday night out as they would have not enjoyed themselves at all. One can only imagine how much this blackout in Cape Town cost those in the restaurant and hotel industry as this weekend was meant to be one of their biggest weekends as the majority of people had been paid. Now since there was no power, people would not be able to spend their money.

If it is not loading shedding by Eskom, it is now technical faults causing power failures. It seems it is now turning into a loose-loose situation for us consumers in South Africa.