At 14:38 Almaty time on Friday, emergency automation began shedding load after three 500 kV lines tripped in quick succession: two circuits between Agadyr and Ulken, and the line from Aktogay to Taldykorgan. The southern zone of Kazakhstan’s grid separated from the national system. Within minutes the lights were out in eight Kazakh regions, in Almaty and Shymkent, in Bishkek and the Chuy and Issyk-Kul regions of Kyrgyzstan, in parts of Uzbekistan, and in Dushanbe, Sughd and Khatlon in Tajikistan.
Almaty’s metro stopped and was evacuated. Traffic lights went dark, and people hung in the Shymbulak cable cars until crews reached them. Restoration moved fast by the standards of these failures: the first load restrictions were lifted 9 minutes in, and KEGOC declared the network fully restored by late afternoon.
Then the operators started explaining, and their accounts do not match. KEGOC’s version, given by its system services director Nurzhan Kerimkulov, is that two hydrogenerators at the Toktogul plant in Kyrgyzstan, 600 MW between them, tripped and overloaded the transit that carries power south. NESK, Kyrgyzstan’s grid company, had stated its version before that detail landed: the Kyrgyz system went into isolated mode after an external disconnection on the Kazakh high voltage line, its own automation worked correctly, and details would follow. No Kyrgyz answer to the generator claim had surfaced by Monday morning in the outlets the desk reads, and the two Kyrgyz state energy sites remain unreadable to this desk behind failed certificates.
Toktogul’s water level has been a state secret since May 2025; now its generators are the named cause of a four-country outage.
Uzbekistan’s energy ministry said the failure originated in a neighbouring country’s grid and that its automation kept the blackout from spreading wider. Tajikistan’s energy ministry called it a major technical failure in the regional system, formed a working group, and took the trouble to deny rumours of an accident at Nurek. A special commission is to establish the cause; no chair and no deadline have been named.
The exchange matters more than the outage. Toktogul’s water level has been a state secret since May 2025; now its generators are the named cause of a four-country outage. NESK has yet to name the cause of Bishkek’s blackout in July. In January 2022 the same southern transit dropped Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan at once; this cascade reached Tajikistan as well, at peak summer load. The event is three days old and this is the first edition since it happened; the blame exchange it started is still running.