Several areas across southern and western Johannesburg are without electricity following a critical network failure at City Power’s Orlando Switching Station.
City Power says the outage was triggered by the failure of a pole-mounted transformer at Eikenhof, followed by a secondary fault on a breaker supplying the Orlando Switching Station.
The utility says technical teams remain on site investigating the fault before repairs can begin. It has not yet provided an estimated time for power restoration.
City Power General Manager for Public Relations and Communication, Isaac Mangena, says the fault has affected several areas across the city.
Mangena says, “This additional fault continued to affect the network and remains the focus of our technical investigations early this morning. The Orlando Switching Station is a critical part of our electricity network and supplies several substations across the south and the western Joburg.
“As a result, the incident has affected customers in areas such as Kibler Park, Mondeor, Naturena, Meredale, Eldorado Park, parts of Soweto, Brixton, Riverlea, Vrosby, Mayfair, Langlaagte, and others. Our operators, protection teams and all the technical specialists remain on site carrying out comprehensive fault-finding investigations between Orlando Switching Station and also Eikenhof to determine the exact cause of the failure and also assess the extent of the damage before the repairs can begin…” says Mangena.
“Because these investigations are still underway, we are unfortunately not able to determine the estimated time for restoration or even the repairs…”
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Critical network failure at Orlando Switching Station causes widespread power outages across three Service Delivery Centres. ^ZD pic.twitter.com/GYgsrSh3eR
— @CityPowerJhb (@CityPowerJhb) July 16, 2026
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The outage was caused by an explosion on 11kV lines from the Orlando Switching Station. Our operators are currently on site attending to this… pic.twitter.com/6hGgRZ5ql8
— @CityPowerJhb (@CityPowerJhb) July 16, 2026
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