Commissario
We had them a lot, and some complete blackouts that lasted anything from minutes to hours.
Apparently the incoming feed to one side of the town was over capacity (yay for building masses of new homes, but no infrastructure), this went on for several years where we'd get little blips on the lights and sometimes the TV would turn off but the PC's would often be fine (advantage of over speccing the PSU) as the various substations tried to switch feeds or did fast resets. For a while we had times where literally half the town would go dark for a while, and if you were on the highstreet you might see one side with no power and the shops on the other side operating fine (it seems that one side of the centre was fed from one main substation on one side of the town that went out, and the other side from another that stayed up).
It only stopped when the distribution company built a battery farm as the fastest/cheapest way to fix the problem, apparently it was going to take years longer to actually run a new high voltage/high capacity line into the town, than it was to get planning permission, design and build the battery barn.
When you've got the sort of weather we've had the last few days the grid is under a lot more stress and more likely to have blips as things like branches and blown rubbish hitting the overhead lines can cause momentary shorts that might trip a breaker but clear before it goes down fully (IIRC a lot of them will automatically reset after X time, but if they have to do it more than 3 or 5 times in a set period they'll then go down on the assumption it's not a momentary issue), from memory that can cause blips in surrounding areas as the grid tries to reroute/substations etc try to swap over to another feed if there is one available and the voltage drops as it happen due to the load remaining the same but supply struggling. I'm probably really mangling the explanation
