The Sudan power cuts of October 2026 reached the capital on Tuesday 27 October, a day after drone strikes on power stations cut electricity across four states in the east and south-east of the country. The Sudan power cuts, trending per news coverage on 27 October 2026, left millions of people without power, according to reports based on the state electricity company and on medics and witnesses, and they raised a wider question that goes beyond one substation: why is Sudan's electricity grid being hit, and what does that mean for hospitals, water supplies and daily life in a country already facing a famine warning? This explainer sets out what is verified, what is attributed to one side or to unnamed sources, and what remains unknown.
Sudan has been at war since April 2023, when the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fell out over how the RSF would be integrated into the regular army and over the country's planned transition to civilian rule. The war has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced nearly 13 million, according to United Nations and international estimates cited in reporting on the strikes. In recent weeks both sides have stepped up drone attacks, striking targets far from the front lines. The Sudan power cuts, caused by attacks on power infrastructure on 26 and 27 October, are the clearest example yet of that shift, because they hit the systems that homes, hospitals and water pumps depend on, rather than a single military target.
What happened in the Sudan power cuts on Monday and Tuesday?
On Monday 26 October, drone strikes hit power stations in south-east Sudan, the state electricity company said. Reuters reported that the operator, the Sudan Electricity Holding Company, accused the RSF of knocking out power in four states: Sennar, Al Qadarif, White Nile and Gezira. The company said the attacks hit stations in Sinja, El Hawata, Al Fao and Mashkour, as well as Al-Junaid in Gezira state, causing what it called severe damage and major destruction to equipment. Reuters said it could not independently verify the company's account, and that the RSF did not immediately respond to a request for comment. That distinction matters: the fact of the outages is reported by the operator and by residents, while the attribution to the RSF on Monday rests on the operator's accusation.
Some reports based on the AFP news agency put the number of power stations hit on Monday at six rather than five. The difference appears to come from how individual substations and transformer sites are counted in different versions of the reports. This article uses the state electricity company's account as reported by Reuters, which names five locations, and notes the higher figure where AFP-based reporting gives it, rather than presenting either number as independently confirmed. What the reports agree on is the scale of the Sudan power cuts: power was cut across four states that together cover about half of the territory currently held by the military, according to Reuters, and the operator warned that the attacks threatened the stability of the whole national grid.
Early on Tuesday 27 October, the strikes reached the capital. Witnesses told the Anadolu news agency that a drone struck the Al-Markhiyat power substation in north-western Omdurman, west of Khartoum, cutting electricity to large parts of Khartoum. Residents in several neighbourhoods confirmed that electricity supplies had been disrupted on Tuesday morning, and videos circulating on social media showed smoke rising from the Al-Markhiyat facility, according to Anadolu. As of 06:30 GMT on Tuesday, Anadolu reported that there was no official statement on the extent of the damage or on who was responsible for the attack. A source in the national electricity company later told AFP, on condition of anonymity, that RSF drones had targeted the Al-Markhiyat transformer station, disrupting power across large parts of Khartoum and Al-Jazira states. The RSF has rarely commented on accusations that it targets civilian infrastructure, according to Anadolu, and it maintains that it works to protect civilians. Readers should therefore treat the Tuesday attribution as reported by an unnamed company source, not as an officially confirmed finding.
Which areas were hit by the Sudan power cuts?
The Sudan power cuts began in the east and south-east and then spread to the capital. On Monday, the affected states were Sennar in the south-east, Al Qadarif (also spelled Gedaref) in the east, White Nile in central Sudan, and Gezira (also called Al-Jazira) in central Sudan. Those are largely areas under army control, and they include farming districts, market towns and the corridors through which food and aid move. When several substations fail at once, the effect is not limited to the towns next to each station: the operator said the damage threatened the stability of the national grid as a whole, which is why outages were reported across whole states rather than in isolated streets.
On Tuesday, the outage reached Khartoum state, including Omdurman, where the Al-Markhiyat substation sits, and parts of Al-Jazira state. Khartoum is the seat of the internationally recognised government, and close to three million people have returned to Khartoum state since the army recaptured the capital area last year, according to AFP-based reporting. Many of those returnees have struggled to rebuild their lives in a damaged city where power and water supplies were already unreliable, unexploded bombs remain a danger, and the economy has collapsed. A new, widespread outage in the capital therefore lands on people who had only recently begun to restore homes, shops and clinics.
How long the Sudan power cuts will last is not yet clear from the reports available on 27 October. The state electricity company said engineering teams were assessing the destruction and beginning repairs after the Monday attacks, according to the Sudan Tribune's account of the company's statement, and security guards were reportedly injured at the Sinja facility. No restoration timetable for the Monday or Tuesday damage had been published in the reports checked for this article. Substations and transformers cannot be repaired with a simple switch: damaged switchgear, transformers and control equipment often need specialist parts and safe access for engineers, and in a war zone both can be hard to arrange. Until the company publishes an assessment, any claim about when power will return to each state should be treated as an estimate, not a fact.
Who was blamed for the Sudan power cuts?
The state electricity company blamed the RSF for the Monday attacks. That is the only named attribution in the Reuters report, and Reuters was explicit that it could not independently verify the company's account. The RSF did not immediately respond to Reuters. For Tuesday's Al-Markhiyat strike, the attribution comes from an anonymous source in the national electricity company speaking to AFP, while Anadolu's earlier report, based on eyewitnesses, recorded no official statement on responsibility as of 06:30 GMT. The two accounts are not contradictory, but they are not the same kind of evidence either: one is a company accusation, one is an unnamed source, and neither has been confirmed by an independent investigation or by the accused party.
The wider pattern is less disputed. Both sides have stepped up drone strikes in October, Reuters reported, with attacks on Nyala, which is held by the RSF, and on Khartoum airport, which is held by the army, among others this month. The RSF has repeatedly targeted Khartoum airport, dams and power stations in the east, according to AFP-based reporting, while the army regularly strikes Nyala, where the RSF has declared a rival administration. That does not prove who carried out any single strike on the power grid, but it does explain why power infrastructure has become a target in this phase of the war: hitting electricity weakens the other side's ability to run cities, hospitals and communications, and it puts pressure on civilians far from the fighting. International humanitarian law requires parties to distinguish between military objectives and civilian objects, and the United Nations has repeatedly warned that attacks on power stations threaten health and other services for millions of people. Whether any particular strike breached that law is a question for investigators with access to the sites, not something that can be settled from news reports alone.
What happened in Nyala, and how does it fit the wider drone war?
On the same days as the Sudan power cuts, a drone strike on a market in Nyala killed 21 people and wounded at least 40 others, according to a medical source and witnesses who spoke to AFP. Nyala is the de facto capital of the RSF in Darfur, in western Sudan. A resident said a market in the north of the city was struck on Monday at about 20:00 local time (18:00 GMT), and a medic at Nyala Hospital said 21 people had been killed and more than 40 injured, although the medic could not say how many of the dead were RSF fighters. The market was frequented by young men, including RSF fighters, according to witnesses. Sudan's military regularly strikes Nyala, and the army and the RSF have traded drone attacks across the country in recent months. This was not an isolated incident: according to a United Nations tally cited in AFP-based reporting, drone strikes killed more than 300 people and injured hundreds more in the first three weeks of October alone.
The Nyala strike and the power station attacks together show how the war is now being fought increasingly through drones. Earlier in October, an earlier wave of drone attacks in Sudan killed more than 160 people as strikes hit markets, dams and camps for displaced people. The shift to long-range drones lets each side reach the other's cities and infrastructure without sending ground forces across front lines, but it also spreads the risk to markets, hospitals and power stations. Civilians bear much of that risk, whether they are shopping in Nyala, waiting for treatment in a hospital that loses power, or living in a city where the water pumps stop.
Why the Sudan power cuts matter for hospitals, water and daily life
Electricity in Sudan is not a convenience. It runs hospital equipment, cold storage for medicines and vaccines, water pumps, bakeries, phone networks and the small generators and charging points on which families depend when the grid fails. When power stations are damaged, the effects cascade: operating theatres and intensive care units must switch to generators, which need fuel that is itself scarce and expensive; water treatment and pumping slow or stop; and food that needs refrigeration spoils in the heat. The United Nations has warned that attacks on power infrastructure threaten health and other services for millions of people already hit hard by the conflict, Reuters reported. That warning is not abstract. Sudan's health system has been weakened by more than three years of war, with hospitals damaged, staff displaced and supplies interrupted, and a BBC investigation into attacks on hospitals in El Fasher found that medical facilities had been deliberately targeted. Power cuts add a further, system-wide strain on care that was already under severe pressure.
The timing of the Sudan power cuts compounds the harm. The power cuts came in the same week that governments warned of famine risk in Sudan, and in a country where 19.5 million people already face high levels of acute food insecurity. Without reliable electricity, mills cannot grind grain, markets cannot keep food cold, and aid warehouses cannot run the systems that track and distribute supplies. Families who lose power also lose the ability to charge phones, which are often their only link to relatives, to cash transfers and to warnings about fighting or flooding. For people in Khartoum who returned after the army recaptured the capital, a prolonged blackout can undo months of slow recovery, forcing shops to close, clinics to turn patients away and households to spend scarce money on fuel for generators.
Sudan power cuts and the famine warning: what did more than 30 governments say?
On 23 October 2026, the governments of more than 30 countries and the European Commission issued a joint statement warning that Sudan faced an alarming deterioration in food security and that the risk of famine in the coming months needed urgent action. The statement, published by Global Affairs Canada, said an estimated 19.5 million people, 41 per cent of Sudan's population, were experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity, including five million facing emergency levels. Without immediate action, it warned, the number of children suffering from severe acute malnutrition could exceed a projected 825,000, and the number of food-insecure areas, initially assessed at 14, was expected to double. Conflict was named as the key driver, displacing millions, damaging critical infrastructure and disrupting healthcare, food production, supply chains and markets, while systematic obstruction of aid and El Nino-related drought across more than half of Sudan made the crisis worse.
The signatories, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and other European governments, called on the warring parties to allow humanitarian operations through all routes, including air access into Darfur, to protect humanitarian personnel, to refrain from hitting civilian infrastructure, and to remove visa delays, customs holdups and taxation requirements imposed on aid organisations. They also called on the international community to scale up funding. The joint statement was circulated publicly by the US State Department on 27 October, the same day as the Khartoum power strike. Sudan's foreign ministry rejected the warnings on Monday, according to reports of its statement, insisting that the food security situation was reassuring and accusing some countries and organisations of politically exploiting the humanitarian situation. That rejection does not change the figures in the joint statement, which come from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system, but it does show how contested the humanitarian picture remains, even as the power cuts make aid delivery harder.
The link between the Sudan power cuts and the famine warning is direct, even though the two stories are reported separately. UK sanctions against Sudan commanders over El Fasher were imposed earlier in October in response to alleged war crimes in Darfur, and the joint famine statement shows that international pressure is now being applied on both the humanitarian and the accountability fronts. If power stations stay out of service, hospitals and water systems in the affected states will need fuel, generators and repairs before they can function normally, and aid agencies will need safe access to deliver them. The governments' call to refrain from hitting civilian infrastructure reads, in that light, as a direct response to the kind of attacks reported on 26 and 27 October.
What happens next after the Sudan power cuts?
Three things will determine what happens next. The first is repair: whether engineers can safely reach the damaged substations, assess the damage and restore power, and whether the state electricity company publishes a timetable. The second is attribution and response: whether the RSF comments on the accusations, whether an official statement clarifies who was responsible for the Al-Markhiyat strike, and whether either side changes its targeting of infrastructure. The third is the humanitarian response: whether aid agencies can move fuel, generators and medical supplies into the affected states, and whether the famine warning leads to faster access and more funding. None of those outcomes was settled in the reports available on 27 October, and this article will need updating as official assessments, casualty figures and repair estimates are published.
For readers following the story, the most reliable signals will be statements from the Sudan Electricity Holding Company on damage and restoration, statements from the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF on the strikes, United Nations updates on health and humanitarian access, and any new reporting that independently verifies the accounts given by the operator and by unnamed sources. Until then, the verified core of the Sudan power cuts story is clear enough: drone strikes hit power stations in four states on Monday, a further strike hit a substation serving Khartoum on Tuesday, millions of people lost power, 21 people were killed in a separate market strike in Nyala, and the attacks came as more than 30 governments warned that famine risk in Sudan needed urgent action. The Sudan power cuts should be remembered first as a blow to civilians who depend on electricity for health, water and food, not only as a development in the military contest between the army and the RSF.
Sources: Reuters reporting on the 26 October drone strikes on power stations in Sennar, Al Qadarif, White Nile and Gezira states, the Sudan Electricity Holding Company's accusation against the RSF, and the United Nations warning on power infrastructure, 26 October 2026; Anadolu reporting via eyewitnesses on the 27 October drone strike on the Al-Markhiyat power substation in Omdurman, smoke at the facility, and the absence of an official statement as of 06:30 GMT, 27 October 2026; AFP reporting via a medical source and witnesses on the Nyala market strike killing 21 people and wounding at least 40, via an anonymous electricity company source on the Al-Markhiyat strike, and via the United Nations tally of more than 300 killed by drone strikes in the first three weeks of October, 27 October 2026; joint statement on the risk of famine in Sudan by more than 30 governments and the European Commission, published by Global Affairs Canada, 23 October 2026, with 19.5 million people facing acute food insecurity; Sudan Tribune reporting on the state electricity company's account of five facilities hit on Monday and engineering assessments, via Addis Standard, 27 October 2026.