India Experiences Power Outage for the Ages

Ten percent of the world was without electricity Tuesday in what was deemed the largest blackout in the planet's history.

And it all happened in one country: India.

As many as 620 million people, more than half of India's population, was affected by the second outage in two days that was felt in 22 of the nation's 28 states.

There were hundreds of trains at a standstill, untold numbers of cars stuck in traffic because there were no lights and millions of people wondering just what happened even as all of the power was restored by Wednesday morning.

While the easy answer was blaming states for taking more power from the grid than they were authorized to do, this has been a long-term problem. And although it's summer in India, the monsoon rains have kept temperatures down.

Investigators were checking out whether a relay problem near the Taj Mahal started the whole mess.

As for what to do about it in the future, there is talk of privatizing more of India's electrical infrastructure so as to rely less on a national grid. Plenty of businesses also have back-up generators just for these emergencies.

Even as Indians were obviously inconvienced by the world's largest power outage, they're taking things in stride since 300 million don't have routine access to electricity anyway.