when did puerto rico go without electricity

Puerto Rico has suffered several major island-wide blackouts; the most infamous and long‑lasting one began after Hurricane Maria struck on September 20, 2017, and some residents did not get electricity back for about 11 months.

Key moments when Puerto Rico “went dark”

• September 20, 2017 – Hurricane Maria:
  Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm, collapsing about 80% of the electric grid and causing the largest blackout in U.S. history and one of the largest ever worldwide.

Many communities lacked power for months, and full restoration for everyone took roughly 328 days, meaning parts of the island effectively went without electricity for nearly a year.

• September 2016 – Substation fire blackout:
  In late September 2016, a fire at a power plant substation in southern Puerto Rico triggered a cascading failure that left nearly 1.5 million customers without power, darkening most of the island until service was slowly restored.

• New Year’s Eve 2024 outage:
  On December 31, 2024, an underground line failure caused an island‑wide or near–island‑wide blackout that left about 90% of customers without power for up to two days.

• April 16, 2025 island‑wide blackout:
  On April 16, 2025, a failure in the protection system combined with vegetation on a key transmission line triggered a cascading grid event that again blacked out virtually the entire island; officials said it could take two to three days to restore power to most customers.

Why this keeps happening

Puerto Rico’s grid is aging and fragile, with years of underinvestment, storm damage, and slow reconstruction making it prone to large‑scale failures. Hurricanes like Maria and later storms, plus technical faults and maintenance issues, mean the island has repeatedly “gone without electricity” on a massive scale, not just once.

If you’re asking about “when did Puerto Rico go without electricity” in the sense of the longest, most catastrophic outage, the answer people usually mean is: after Hurricane Maria in September 2017, with some areas waiting almost a year for power to return.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.