**Nation Faces Power Outage in Sri Lanka Amidst Ongoing Economic Struggles**

**Emergency services and essential facilities prioritized as technicians work to resolve the outage.**

Sri Lanka has been grappling with a significant national power outage that has left many buildings, including hospitals, reliant on backup generators. Efforts are underway to restore electricity across the island, although officials warn that it may take several hours for full service to be reinstated. Emergency measures have prioritized the needs of medical facilities and water purification plants to mitigate any public health risks. Energy Minister Kumara Jayakody attributed the outage to a rather unusual cause: a monkey reportedly made contact with a grid transformer, leading to an operational imbalance in the system. The Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) confirmed that the blackout emanated from an incident at a sub-station situated south of the capital, Colombo, yet has not provided additional details regarding the emergency. Engineers are actively addressing the situation with the goal of a swift resolution, asserting that they are making every effort to rectify the widespread disruption. With a population of 22 million, businesses and hospitals have been forced to utilize generators or inverters during the outage, recalling the severe blackouts experienced during the economic crisis of 2022 that previously plagued the nation.