Load shedding and load reduction are different things
South Africans now deal with two kinds of scheduled power cuts, and they have different causes.
Load shedding is a national measure. Eskom uses it when generation can't meet demand, and it's announced in stages, with each stage removing about 1,000 MW. Load reduction is local. Eskom applies it to specific networks it says are overloaded, during the morning and evening peaks, and it can continue while load shedding is suspended. Eskom says only KwaZulu-Natal still has it, and it aims to end load reduction nationally by March 2027.
Neither covers ordinary faults, which are often the real reason your lights are off. If your area isn't scheduled, report it to your supplier.
Eskom or your municipality?
This is the question that trips people up, because the answer can change from one street to the next. Eskom sells directly to about 6.8 million customers, while municipalities run their own networks in their licensed areas and account for about 44% of Eskom's sales.
Metros such as City Power in Johannesburg, City of Cape Town, eThekwini Electricity in Durban and Centlec in the Free State each publish their own schedules. Parts of those same cities are supplied by Eskom directly, so a neighbour's schedule may not apply to you. Check who bills you, then use that supplier's schedule.
No South African distributor we checked publishes a live outage map. The pages we link to are the closest official equivalents: status pages, outage lists and notices.
How load shedding grew
Eskom dates load shedding to 2007. It returned in 2014 and 2015 after the Majuba silo collapse, then stopped entirely in 2016 and 2017. Stage 6 was used for the first time on 9 December 2019.
The worst came in 2022 and 2023. The CSIR counted 3,773 hours in 2022, then 6,948 hours in 2023, with 1,063 of those at Stage 6. Load shedding then fell sharply: all 1,656 hours in 2024 came before 26 March. It returned briefly in early 2025, including Stage 6 in February, and Eskom's records show the last load shedding on 15 May 2025.
What Eskom's reliability figures show
Eskom Distribution reported 34.91 hours without power per customer and 11.70 interruptions in its financial year to March 2025. That's much higher than the figures on our other country pages, though definitions differ. It covers Eskom's own network only, so municipal customers aren't included. It also stayed near 35 hours through the record load-shedding years, which suggests it doesn't count load shedding at all, although Eskom's reports don't say so directly.