Turkmen.news reported the outage on Monday, 31 August; Azatlyk, the Turkmen service of RFE/RL, put out its own account the same day at 11:22; the Chronicles of Turkmenistan published on the Sunday evening and updated on Monday. The three do not copy each other and their details differ.
On the shape of the event they agree. The lights went out at about 17:20 to 17:30 local time on Sunday. In Ashgabat the Berzengi district was back by 19:40 and the Parahat microdistricts by 21:30; Mary and Lebap returned at about 21:30; Turkmenbashy on the Caspian waited until 00:30 on Monday. Mobile networks, the internet and traffic lights went down with the grid; police directed traffic by hand; water stopped in apartment blocks. Contact with Dashoguz province was lost, so whether the fifth province was dark is unrecorded.
Ashgabat's answer to its own blackout so far is that armed personnel appeared on the central streets of Turkmenabat that evening.
On the cause they part. Azatlyk quotes a regional official as saying an accident or malfunction occurred at the Mary State Power Plant, “possibly a serious defect in one of the generating units”, and says it could not confirm this elsewhere. The Chronicles record a loud crackling in the network before the failure and write that “the causes and the real scale of the blackout are so far unknown”. Both say the same about the state: “No official statements have come from the authorities or the responsible agencies.”
Azatlyk's Ashgabat source calls it the largest power outage in Turkmenistan's history. CAW cannot test that claim against a record the state does not publish, and prints it as the source's.
Silence is the second fact. By Wednesday morning the state news agency and the government portal carried no statement on the outage, its cause or its repair. The plant Azatlyk's source names is the country's largest, and Turkmenistan sells power south to Afghanistan from that grid; a fault there is a regional question as well as a domestic one.
The timing adds a comparison the region will draw itself. Sixteen days earlier, on 14 August, a failure traced provisionally to Toktogul took down Kyrgyzstan and parts of its neighbours, and Kazakhstan had a government commission on it within the week. Ashgabat's answer to its own blackout so far is that armed personnel appeared on the central streets of Turkmenabat that evening.