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Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
- abe94 2y agocan coming into contact with a single transformer disrupt power to the entire island?
- remram 2y agoI guess that depends on the kind of contact, and how much spare capacity you have. If you're running with very little spare, a single transformer malfunction might be impossible to make up for entirely. A good reminder that efficiency is often at odds with reliability.
- Aurornis 2y agoTheir grid is maxed out. Losing any single major section pushes it over the edge. They have to use rolling blackouts where different parts of the grid are turned off throughout the day to keep the overall system under the limit. Sri Lanka has about as many people as Florida and lower per-person energy usage. Their country’s power grid is smaller than that of many US states.
- raggles 2y agoI imagine there was some sort of cascading failure involved, as in the transformer tripped, but this then overloaded another circuit which then tripped, or there was a power swing that was unsustainable, then you get over\underfrequency tripping off load and generators... this can get quite complex quite quickly in power systems, especially smaller systems found on islands.
- wongarsu 2y agoNot in a healthy well-managed grid. Alas, this is Sri Lanka
- baq 2y agoWhen ercot tells Texans to turn off their ac this is exactly to prevent a cascading failure which trips all breakers everywhere because one transformer died on a maxed out grid.
- egberts1 2y agoYes. Having lived on a 8-mile by 5-mile island, power grid USED to be fed with a single transformer before the state funded a power company to take over and properly re-grid it. Silly as it may sound, outage was easily triggered by a wildlife (beavers by flooding, hawk-arial-nest, chipmunk tunnels, male-deers pushes it, badgers weaken foundation, even bees and ants) by disrupting poles that support the grid. They'll trip the breakers at the transformers. Even leak PCB oil from within a transformer to a point of melting the copper winding coil inside the transformer, but that was a manufacturing flaw, not nature intervention. So yeah, it seems harder to do and less frequent without monkey, but non-monkey-disruptor has been known to happen.
- graemep 2y ago> Having lived on a 8-mile by 5-mile island That is a whole lot smaller than Sri Lanka which is 268 miles by 139 miles and has a population of about 22m. Size similar to Ireland, population about 80% that of Australia.
- Acrobatic_Road 2y agobut was the monkey alright?
- xyst 2y agoVery unlikely > The animal had come into contact with the transformer at the station, disrupting supply to the entire country Bro was cooked
- ridiculous_leke 2y agoAnother example how human civilization, in its present form, is generally incompatible with Earth's flora and fauna. Obviously, going back to stone-age is not a solution for us. But we certainly need to update/devise methods that do not harm anyone living creatures (or at least the sentient ones). Poor monkey had no idea what he got into and suffered a brutal death.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> we certainly need to update/devise methods that do not harm anyone living creatures (or at least the sentient ones) Nature is brutal. I distinctly remember a hike where I stumbled on a mother bear (RIP) tearing apart a still-alive baby elk for her cubs. Human civilisation has done a lot of damage. But we might also be able to spare a lot of sentient suffering, bringing care to the biosphere and taking station as nature’s ethical guardians. Food for thought if you find yourself going full misanthrope.
- rectang 2y agoHumans are far and away the most cruel species that has ever walked the face of the earth. No other species has the capacity to invent torture, using our analytical abilities to keep the victim alive indefinitely while inflicting the most vicious agonies possible (e.g. torturing the child in front of the parent).
- 2y ago
- anothereng 2y ago[flagged]
- etrautmann 2y agoPlease don’t here.
- hokumguru 2y agoThis is really not OK to laugh at and I feel horrible for doing so.
- anothereng 2y agorelax I live in a 'banana republic' as well
- xyst 2y agoA real life example of a “chaos monkey”. Folks, doesn’t matter if it’s physical or digital. Test your systems for resiliency
- aqueueaqueue 2y ago[flagged]
- tap-snap-or-nap 2y ago[flagged]
- swores 2y agoPlease don't shitpost here :(
- catlikesshrimp 2y agoThis happened on February the 9th - 10th This wikipedia article was marked for deletion, so just in case https://archive.ph/wip/7fvmI https://archive.ph/wip/7fvmI Other forums are mentioning conspiracy theories about political oponents sabotaging the current (new) government. No skin in that game
- taspeotis 2y agoYeah this wasn’t even interesting when I read about it a week ago Hacker “Olds” amirite
- ForOldHack 2y agoWhy would someone want to delete an article that was absolutely complete rubbish? Wikipedia may have standards, but they are really really low. Of course it was all the monkeys fault, for being part of a geographic location, with poor energy planning, poor infrastructure support, in a third world country, all the things intervening primates need to shovel disinformation. "The nationwide blackouts were attributed to a massive disruption caused by a monkey which had apparently intervened to trigger an irreparable damage which made it unable to restore the electricity in most parts of Sri Lanka immediately after the incident had unfolded." ( This from the Wikipedia article is not Artificial Intelligence, its shocked monkeys forced to type randomly type ). Damn that damn monkey, and his triggering intervention of irreparable damage. Just what do they think AI will do with all this world salad? Was it written by AI or was it written by the monkey as a suicide note? or the place went to sh*t-hole Level 5 when Arthur C Clarke died? Inquiring minds what to know, why third world problems require primate interventions? This could have happened anywhere? Puerto Rico? New York in 1977? London 2003? Was it all the work of intervening primates? When your premise is utterly absurd, you can drive the point anywhere: Shock the Monkey.
- jll29 2y agoAs much as I love REUTERS, this one is incomplete: what about the monkey? And can we have a photo?
- ceejayoz 2y agoI’m guessing you can get the general idea from a photo of some charcoal briquettes.
- journal 2y agoHow dare you force my brain to use more of it's processing power to understand the reference in your comment. /s
- lmpdev 2y agoYou can’t photograph what no longer exists…
- aaron695 2y agoMonkey photo - https://www.hirunews.lk/english/396308/monkey-blamed-for-the-island-wide-power-outage-photos-revealed https://www.hirunews.lk/english/396308/monkey-blamed-for-the...
- daeken 2y agoJust a heads up to those clicking, the monkey is super dead in the photo.
- ForOldHack 2y ago"A group of monkeys who entered the Panadura Power Station had ended up in a spat." Yes, it is incomplete. https://bmkltsly13vb.compat.objectstorage.ap-singapore-1.oraclecloud.com/cdn.sg.dailymirror.lk/assets/uploads/image_597bf4eb4f.jpg https://bmkltsly13vb.compat.objectstorage.ap-singapore-1.ora...
- spike021 2y agoNot nearly the same thing but this reminds me of the Playstation game, Ape Escape. Real classic.
- jihadjihad 2y agoApe Escape was great, and IIRC it was the first game that went all-in on the new DualShock controllers. You couldn’t even catch a monkey unless you nailed both sticks perfectly at the same time!
- nsbk 2y agoDefinitely one of my favorite games on the original PlayStation and a great fit for the newly added capabilities of the DualShock controller
- cozzyd 2y agoThis has the hallmarks of curious George
- bl4ckneon 2y agoExpect there is no next episode when he gets in contact with high voltage electrical equipment...
- Henchman21 2y agoAh yes, the last book in the series: Curious George and the Electric Fence Truly, a classic
- ForOldHack 2y agoMonkey business. Shock the monkey. ooh!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ty6853 2y ago[flagged]
- roenxi 2y agoIt is hard to think about Sri Lanka without recalling [0] that this is the country which recently attempted to institute a fertiliser ban. My default assumptions about their general infrastructure management are unflattering. [0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-decimates-sri-lankan-crops-government-popularity-ebbs-2022-03-03/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-d...
- jamal-kumar 2y agoWow that's crazy. You know when Greenpeace is saying they messed going organic up that they probably really messed going organic up... https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/story/on-sri-lankas-fertiliser-ban/ https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/story/on-sri-lankas-fert...
- lostlogin 2y agoThe relatively recent genocide also points to a high level of dysfunction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_genocide
- ignoramous 2y agoAs for the civil war, things could have ended differently, except Prabhakaran seemed to have been gripped by arrogance. Though he was fighting for Tamils, paradoxically, Prabhakaran also became the big killer of Tamils. He annihilated all competing Tamil militant groups ... ... it all led to [Prabhakaran's] last apocalyptic decision to fight to the last day — and the last Tamil. Through Kumaran Pathmanathan, KP, the LTTE ‘foreign minister’, we offered to bring out all the combatants and civilians from the war zone. When KP went to finalise the deal, Prabhakaran refused. The rest is history. https://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/the-ltte-chiefs-rise-and-fall-review-of-mr-narayan-swamys-the-rout-of-prabhakaran/article69175420.ece https://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/the-ltte-chiefs... / https://archive.vn/B2Gxv https://archive.vn/B2Gxv Unfortunate for the Tamils how it all played out, with little intervention or pressure from other regional powers. The past violence and pogroms were already indicative of the State's intent; they didn't need a second invitation.
- bananatype 2y ago[dead]
- nreece 2y agoRelated: just today came across this post on X.. "Sri Lanka will become next Bali as long as it gets fiber." https://x.com/strzibnyj/status/1890628037529727220 https://x.com/strzibnyj/status/1890628037529727220
- sureIy 2y agoI love how people compare places to Bali and Cancun and then lack everything that people like about those places. Having a beach is not enough. You can find beaches everywhere. Bali beaches aren't even that good.
- TowerTall 2y agoI live on a small island in Thailand, and here, "becoming Bali" is a term that describes a place that has been over-constructed with bungalows and villas; it has become very crowded and very expensive. Most tropical islands started out as hippie places where all houses were cheap, rudimentary wooden bungalows, but then mass tourism and housing investors moved in and pushed the "original hippie population" out and replaced them with expensive villas. That is what is meant by becoming Bali. My guess for the origin of this expression is that Bali was the first place where this happened.
- chris_va 2y agoI don't suppose you can recommend a place in Thailand that is not "becoming Bali" but still tourist friendly enough for non-locals to visit without feeling guilty about ruining the vibe?
- sureIy 2y agoThailand has a long coast. Point at any small/medium settlement or island and Google it. Even Phuket has areas that aren't super developed. I visited Koh Yao Yai and it was indeed chill, maybe too chill because there was nothing to do there after a couple of days.
- 2y ago
- grg0 2y agoThe monkey was a foreign nation state sponsored insider testing the nation's grid. Sri Lanka is in trouble, and authorities are mobilizing fast and expanding the surveillance state to thwart future threats before they are realized. They are deploying AI at scale.
- ForOldHack 2y agoObligatory: Did they forget to mount the scratch monkey?
- rightbyte 2y agoI think you need to add a "/s" for mocking insane fearmongering jingoist statements nowadays. Just saying.
- psychoslave 2y agoIs that for sarcasm?
- kopirgan 2y ago[flagged]
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoUnfortunately it's looks as if Cyber Squirrel 1* hasn't been updated since 2019. This disruption would be one of the more successful operations. *https://cybersquirrel1.com/ https://cybersquirrel1.com/
- nuccy 2y agoThe operations are international and are carried out not only by squirrels, weasels (some say martens) are also involved. One of those (unlikely unintentionally) had shutdown the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2016: 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36173247 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36173247
- gibspaulding 2y agoIt’s unclear whose side the mustelidae are on. Some have been known to collaborate with the physicists. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/felicia-ferret-particle-accelerator-fermilab https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/felicia-ferret-particl...
- whodidntante 2y ago[flagged]
- allenrb 2y agoThe best line: “There were no immediate details on whether the monkey survived the incident.” Going way out on a limb here, but perhaps the monkey who disrupted equipment carrying enough power to mess up the entire country was most likely charred into an unrecognizable state. But hey, maybe it got lucky!
- spikedavis 2y ago♫ This monkey's gone to Heaven ♫
- milleramp 2y agoDon't you know you're going to shock the monkey ♫
- AdamJacobMuller 2y agoThere are no details because nobody can find the monkey. It's now a cloud of ash.
- swivelmaster 2y agoViral marketing for the new Oz Perkins movie is getting really out of hand!
- eipie10 2y ago[flagged]
- pythonguython 2y agoThe title sounds whimsical, but animals cause a significant amount of outages. Around 5-10% are caused by animals. When I interned at a power company I saw them install “squirrel guard” insulating equipment terminals
- KennyBlanken 2y ago[flagged]
- MichaelZuo 2y agoYeah from what I recall it was just important enough to actually push through system wide, but not important enough to bother with a PR effort. Speaking from experience as being the intern responsible for pushing through most projects in Toronto during the summer of 2016.
- DecentShoes 2y agoNo it didn't. A lack of redundancy caused an islandwide outage.
- Jailbird 2y agoI heard similar but haven't found a "no, it wasn't a monkey" article yet.
- athenot 2y agoThe point is that the monkey was only the trigger. But the full cause of an outage is much more than just the trigger. It's a monkey this time, could have been an operator or a storm... Digging a bit deeper, they appear to be running with very little margin, if any. Meaning redundancy and protection against cascading failures is limited. Fixing the real cause is expensive, so it's often easier to just blame the trigger—though admittedly in this case it makes for a great headline. :)
- nullc 2y agoor a kite. It's not like the monkey deployed special monkey skills beyond "occupy space while being electrically conductive".
- Jailbird 2y agoOK, in all fairness I did think all we were talking about was the trigger, not the underlying vulnerable system (which I already had understood to be less than solid over the years.)
- billfruit 2y agoIn other words the monkey was only the straw that broke the camels back.
- orbital-decay 2y agoAccording to the report the faulty busbar caused a frequency drop, I doubt this could have been prevented by having more redundancy, the failure mode was more complex than that.
- chintan 2y agoAs per the Ramayana (Hindu mythology), Hanuman (the monkey God) had set the city of Lanka on fire. https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/15588/why-did-hanuman-burn-the-city-of-lanka https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/15588/why-did-h... Just a strange coincidence.
- entropicgravity 2y agoI presume the monkey got fried.
- oniony 2y agoI guess that all depends upon whether or not it was a super-conducting monkey.
- cies 2y ago> There were no immediate details on whether the monkey survived the incident. I was also thinking about the monkey. Sadly we don't know. Also: if a monkey can cause this much drama, I'm not sure if the monkey is to blame (as per the title). This is gov't pushing the blame to the monkey imho.
- miyuru 2y agopreliminarily report for the incident is here. https://pucsl-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/personal/chinthakal_pucsl_gov_lk/EeReFOUtZL1GvWxL1mklekkBrVZ-B8rtSRiAXJyq4QGGig?e=hrbcTU https://pucsl-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/personal/chinthakal_pu...
- roncesvalles 2y agoHoly clickbait. The title implies that Sri Lanka is totally out of power like Haiti, but that's far from the truth. >Ninety-minute power cuts were implemented on Monday and Tuesday to manage demand. An investigation into the outage was being conducted by the energy ministry. This is the extent of the "outage". It's more of a capacity reduction than a grid failure.
- Boltgolt 2y agoMentioning "load shedding" would have made a more accurate title
- picafrost 2y agoBBC's 'Mammals' [0] spends a portion of one of its episodes discussing the plight of howler monkeys in Costa Rica. [1] These monkeys die frequently to electrocution as urbanization continues. The power lines look like reasonable crossing routes above the dangerous and hostile human world. The solution they implemented was to build canopy bridges safe for the monkeys. This isn't cost efficient but it's the right thing to do. Wouldn't it be nice if we could call it the humane thing to do? In general, "humane" seems to stop with human lives, despite the fact that we like to style ourselves caretakers of this planet. [0] https://www.bbcearth.com/shows/mammals https://www.bbcearth.com/shows/mammals [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5ZpLHZzWv93X70kvP2TjgzC/giving-a-voice-to-the-plight-of-howler-monkeys https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5ZpLHZzWv93X70kvP2...
- concordDance 2y ago> This isn't cost efficient but it's the right thing to do. Depends on the ratio you put on human vs animal lives. Money is fungible, the more you spend on walkways the less you spend on road signage or MRI machines.
- test6554 2y agoSome places attract tourism because of the local wildlife. Take that away and eventually they wouldn’t be able to afford MRI machines anyway.