Nigeria’s national electricity grid collapsed on Friday afternoon, plunging the country into another nationwide blackout after power generation and distribution dropped to zero across all electricity distribution companies.
Data from the Nigerian Independent System Operator showed that the system failure occurred at about 1:00 pm, when electricity allocation to the 11 distribution companies nationwide fell to zero.
Power generation simultaneously crashed to zero megawatts, triggering a complete shutdown of supply.
A review of the national distribution load profile confirmed that all distribution companies, including Abuja, Eko, Benin, Enugu, Ibadan, Ikeja, Jos, Kano, Kaduna, Port Harcourt and Yola, recorded zero load at the time of the collapse.
Prior to the outage, electricity demand had been high in major cities.
Abuja Electricity Distribution Company was receiving about 639 megawatts, while Ikeja Electric had an allocation of approximately 630 megawatts, underscoring the scale of the sudden system failure.
Further checks showed that national power generation plunged sharply from over 4,500 megawatts to about 24 megawatts by 1:30 pm.
All 23 power generation plants connected to the national grid reportedly lost output during the incident, leaving no electricity available for distribution.
As of the time of filing this report, the Transmission Company of Nigeria, which manages the national grid, had not disclosed the cause of the collapse.
Although restoration efforts were said to be underway, there was no clear timeline for the full recovery of power supply.
Repeated attempts to reach officials of the company for immediate comment were unsuccessful.
The latest outage is the first recorded collapse of Nigeria’s national grid in 2026 and comes just weeks after a similar system failure on December 29, 2025, which also resulted in widespread blackouts across the country.
In recent years, recurring grid collapses have been linked to technical faults, poor maintenance of transmission infrastructure and instability in generation capacity.
Power sector stakeholders have continued to urge the Federal Government and industry operators to strengthen contingency measures and invest in grid resilience to prevent repeated nationwide outages.
