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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

If power to 3% of the population was lost around here, it would be considered a heads-will-roll catastrophe.

If I understand right, the largest power failure in the UK (not counting the coal miner strikes) was the 1987 storm, and that didn't reach 3% in the UK*, more like 1.15%. I can't find exact figures for the percentage affected by the 2006 European blackout, but assuming the region boundaries and population hasn't shifted too much since then, that was also a bit less than 3%.

* nor did it reach 3% in France, which was affected worse; but a quick search didn't give me a list of French power failures to compare sizes of.

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Remember that 3% of Georgia is not 3% of the entire U.S.

And? 3% of the UK isn't 3% of Europe.

Georgia is big enough that percentages is the right measure. If this had been Rhode Island or Hawaii then law of large numbers no longer applies and correlation of failures means that seeing even 30% affected isn't crazy. But Georgia is 11 million people, doesn't get that excuse, 3% is still a lot.

You said that the 1987 outage didn't reach 3% of the UK. The 2025 outage in Georgia didn't reach 3% of the US, either. You compared a state with a major power outage to multiple countries, as though it were a meaningful comparison—I don't see how it is.

US states may not be sovreign like EU states are, but they're similar in a lot of other ways.

Cool. 100% of Italy lost power in 2003. That's over 50 million people.

Resulting in a major investigation, whose conclusions were acted upon to try to ensure it didn't happen again.

If you sit on your backside and say "eh, not too bad, these things happen", then you normalise failure, and things keep getting worse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

Agreed. On that note London is also big enough that percentages are the right measure. Here is 7% of London being knocked out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_London_blackout

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