Their grid is maxed out. Losing any single major section pushes it over the edge. They have to use rolling blackouts where different parts of the grid are turned off throughout the day to keep the overall system under the limit.
Sri Lanka has about as many people as Florida and lower per-person energy usage. Their country’s power grid is smaller than that of many US states.
I imagine there was some sort of cascading failure involved, as in the transformer tripped, but this then overloaded another circuit which then tripped, or there was a power swing that was unsustainable, then you get over\underfrequency tripping off load and generators... this can get quite complex quite quickly in power systems, especially smaller systems found on islands.
I guess that depends on the kind of contact, and how much spare capacity you have. If you're running with very little spare, a single transformer malfunction might be impossible to make up for entirely.
A good reminder that efficiency is often at odds with reliability.
When ercot tells Texans to turn off their ac this is exactly to prevent a cascading failure which trips all breakers everywhere because one transformer died on a maxed out grid.
Having lived on a 8-mile by 5-mile island, power grid USED to be fed with a single transformer before the state funded a power company to take over and properly re-grid it.
Silly as it may sound, outage was easily triggered by a wildlife (beavers by flooding, hawk-arial-nest, chipmunk tunnels, male-deers pushes it, badgers weaken foundation, even bees and ants) by disrupting poles that support the grid.
They'll trip the breakers at the transformers.
Even leak PCB oil from within a transformer to a point of melting the copper winding coil inside the transformer, but that was a manufacturing flaw, not nature intervention.
So yeah, it seems harder to do and less frequent without monkey, but non-monkey-disruptor has been known to happen.
That is a whole lot smaller than Sri Lanka which is 268 miles by 139 miles and has a population of about 22m. Size similar to Ireland, population about 80% that of Australia.
