Berlin power outage highlights flaws in German infrastructure

10 Jan 2026 14:23

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Berlin power outage highlights flaws in German infrastructure

(Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images)

What appeared to be a routine power outage, causing large parts of southwest Berlin to be plunged into icy darkness, is now being investigated as a possible act of sabotage, raising concerns about the vulnerability of Germany’s infrastructure.

As January temperatures dropped into the teens, about 100,000 people in roughly 45,000 households were left without electricity or heating beginning last Saturday. Hospitals and care facilities switched to emergency generators. Public transportation slowed or stopped altogether, News.Az reports, citing The Washington Post.

By Wednesday, when power was fully restored, the blackout had become the longest in the German capital since the end of World War II, and authorities say it was caused deliberately — by an arson attack on a small bridge carrying bundled power cables across the city’s Teltow Canal.

On Sunday, a group calling itself the Vulkangruppe, or Volcano Group, which is described by authorities as a left-wing extremist organization, claimed responsibility.

The bridge, visible on publicly available satellite images, sits in a secluded location, where a fire could be set without immediate detection.

Security experts warned that if small-time saboteurs could disrupt electrical service for a large portion of the capital, the nation’s power grid and other critical infrastructure could be at risk of coordinated attacks by state actors such as Russia.

“We short-circuited the charred cable strands with steel bars lying around,” the Vulkangruppe wrote in a statement, framing the attack as a strike against the “climate-damaging gas industry” and data centers used for artificial intelligence, which it called “nothing more than gigantic, energy-guzzling data centers and server farms.”

News.Az