Except that you would have no control over when the outage happens as you would have to wait around for a random lightning strike to initiate the chain reaction

Except that you would have no control over when the outage happens as you would have to wait around for a random lightning strike to initiate the chain reaction. This outage lasted a very short time. An attacker would likely want to take advantage of the power loss in some way, meaning control over the timing would be pretty important.