Shocking Meltdown: City Power’s “Catastrophic” Tech Failure Plunges Citizens Into Digital Darkness

The lifeline of South Africa’s economic hub has been SEVERED. City Power, the entity responsible for keeping the lights on in Johannesburg, is spiraling into a catastrophic FAILURE of its own making. This is NOT a “temporary outage.” This is a SYSTEMIC COLLAPSE exposing a utility teetering on the brink of total dysfunction.

Insiders are calling this a digital catastrophe of unprecedented scale. The Forcelink and SAP systems—the VERY NERVOUS SYSTEM of the utility—have CRASHED. This isn’t just about slow customer service; this is about a complete paralysis of critical operations. Residents CANNOT report power outages. Technical teams CANNOT be dispatched. Customer accounts are a BLACK HOLE of information. The city is operating on blind luck and “manual systems,” a laughable term that translates to CHAOS and DELAY while families sit in the dark.

Spokesman Isaac Mangena’s hollow reassurance that “operations on the ground remain unaffected” is a DANGEROUS LIE designed to placate the public. How can operations be unaffected when the mechanism to identify, assign, and fix problems is DEAD? This is a clear and present danger to public safety, business continuity, and basic human dignity.

This technological implosion is the latest symptom of a ROTTING CORRUPTION and BLATANT INCOMPETENCE that has plagued the city’s infrastructure for years. Billions have been spent, yet the essential systems fail at the first sign of pressure. Customers are now being told to navigate a labyrinthine phone line—a single point of failure for millions—while the so-called “IT department” scrambles. This is not governance; this is ADMINISTRATIVE SABOTAGE.

As Johannesburg plunges into uncertainty, one terrifying question hangs in the air: if they can’t even keep their computers on, what makes you think they can keep YOUR lights on? The trust is broken, and the darkness is spreading far beyond the power grid.