South Africa is one of the few countries where a power cut had a name, a published timetable and a stage number announced on the evening news. For visitors the word arrived in packing lists alongside adapters and malaria tablets, and it shaped how people planned trips for years.
That era has ended. Knowing what it was and what replaced it is more useful now than a warning about something that is not happening.
What load shedding was
Load shedding was controlled rationing of the national grid. When demand exceeded what Eskom could generate, the utility removed blocks of the country from the grid on a rotating schedule so that the whole system did not collapse. It began at the end of 2007 and recurred in five distinct periods over the next eighteen years.
Two features made it distinctive. The first was that it was scheduled: you could look up your area and know the hours. The second was that it was national, so a cut in Cape Town and a cut in Pretoria came from the same decision.
The stages
The staging system was the part that made the news readable. Each stage represented 1000 megawatts of demand removed, and higher stages meant larger cuts applied for longer each day.
Stage 1 meant a relatively light touch, with most people barely noticing. Stage 6, first used in December 2019, meant 6000 megawatts taken off the grid and most of the country losing power for several hours a day in rotation. Stage 8 was planned for and, at the worst moments, openly discussed.
The published schedules always understated the experience by half an hour. After the two to four hour outage, the area had to be switched back on, and that extra time was not counted in the numbers.
Where it stands now
The last national load shedding was implemented on 16 May 2025, and none has been implemented since. Eskom reported its energy availability factor at 67.96 percent in September 2026, diesel spending down sharply on the year before, and load reduction down to 3.4 percent of customers.
An availability factor of roughly 68 percent means a third of the generating fleet is unavailable at any moment, mostly for maintenance that was neglected for years and is now being caught up on. That is the honest picture: the system is far healthier than in 2022 and 2023, and it is not a system with much slack in it.
For a visitor this means load shedding is no longer something to plan around. It remains something to be aware of.
What still causes outages
Local outages still happen, and they are a different thing with a similar effect.
Cable theft is the largest single cause. Thieves take copper from substations and overhead lines, and a neighbourhood can lose power for hours or days while it is replaced. Municipal networks that are overloaded, or where illegal connections have pushed demand past the design of the cables, are subjected to load reduction, which is a local version of the same idea and affects specific streets rather than the country.
Bad weather, ageing local equipment and ordinary faults account for the rest. None of it is national, and all of it is the kind of thing that can happen anywhere in the world.
How to travel ready
The whole routine comes down to one habit: charge when you have power rather than when you need it. A phone at 80 percent in the afternoon is worth more than a phone at 20 percent because you assumed the evening would have electricity.
If you are working remotely, ask specifically whether the wifi is on a backed up circuit. Many guesthouses and hotels keep the router and a few lights on an inverter or a generator, and knowing which sockets stay alive removes the guesswork.
What it means for an eSIM and your phone
A power cut does not damage an eSIM and does not stop it working. The plan lives on a chip and on the operator’s server, and neither needs your wall socket.
What a cut can affect is the network itself. Mobile towers run on batteries and some have generators, and in the worst years battery theft meant towers dropped off with the grid. Today a local outage can still take a tower with it for the duration, which is worth knowing if you are relying on a call rather than a message.
The practical answer is the same as everything else about data on a trip. Have a plan that is already installed and working before you need it, keep the phone charged when charging is available, and do not depend on a single moment of connectivity for anything important. An eSIM for South Africa covers the setup, and what the networks reach covers where signal is thin for other reasons.