Malawi Hit by Fresh Nationwide Blackout

Malawi was plunged into another nationwide blackout on Wednesday night after the country’s electricity utility reported a shutdown of the national power system, just weeks after a similar failure left the country without electricity.

The Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (ESCOM) said the latest shutdown occurred at 10:45 p.m. on 9 September, but that its technical teams were still working to determine the cause.

“We have experienced a system shutdown,” ESCOM said in a notice to customers, adding that it would inform the nation once the facts had been established.

The utility did not give a timeframe for restoring electricity or disclose what triggered the latest system failure.

Another nationwide shutdown

The outage comes about five weeks after a nationwide system shutdown on 2 August, when ESCOM’s grid collapsed at 7:11 a.m., cutting electricity across Malawi’s Southern, Central and Northern regions.

Power was restored progressively that morning, with the Southern Region reconnected first, followed by the Central and Northern regions.

ESCOM was still investigating the cause of that shutdown after power had been restored.

The recurrence adds to concerns about the stability of Malawi’s electricity system, which has also faced scheduled load-shedding and other supply disruptions.

ESCOM maintains a programme of planned and unplanned outages and has published load-shedding schedules at various points in 2025 and 2026.

ESCOM is responsible for transmitting and distributing electricity across Malawi, as well as managing system operations and acting as the single buyer for the power sector.

The latest blackout could disrupt households, businesses and public services across the country, although ESCOM had not immediately disclosed the scale of the impact or when electricity would be fully restored.

The utility urged customers to await further updates while its technical teams investigated the failure.