Power cut leaves around 3,000 households in north-east Munich without electricity

Around 3,000 households in the north-east of Munich lost electricity on the afternoon of 13 July 2026, after an underground power cable was accidentally severed during construction work. The outage began at about 13:45 and was fully resolved a little over two hours later, according to the municipal utility Stadtwerke München (SWM).

The affected area lay mainly in the north of Bogenhausen, east of the Englischer Garten, and included the districts of Oberföhring, Englschalking, Denning and Johanneskirchen. SWM said the zone stretched roughly from the Isar and the western edge of the Englischer Garten to the fringe of Daglfing in the east, and from the Denninger Straße up towards the München-Nord motorway junction.

An SWM spokesperson said the cause was a cable damaged by a digger on a building site in the area of Effnerstraße and Freischützstraße. Crews were dispatched to repair the line and to restore supply as quickly as possible, reconnecting customers in stages.

By around 15:30, roughly two-thirds of the affected households had been brought back online through switching measures that rerouted power across the local network. The utility then worked to reconnect the remaining customers, and shortly after 16:30 confirmed that everyone affected had electricity again.

SWM said the U-Bahn and tram networks were not affected by the outage, so public transport in the area continued to operate normally throughout the incident. That limited the wider disruption to the city, keeping the impact largely confined to homes and businesses in the north-eastern districts.

Short-lived cable faults of this kind are not unusual on busy urban building sites, where excavation work can occasionally strike buried infrastructure. The relatively quick recovery reflected the ability of the local grid to reroute supply while repair crews worked on the damaged section.

The utility posted updates on its fault page during the incident and said its M-Sicherheitsservice had been informed as crews worked to restore supply. Residents in Oberföhring, Englschalking, Denning and Johanneskirchen reported electronic devices cutting out in the early afternoon before power was gradually switched back on.

With the cable damaged on a live construction site, Stadtwerke München said repairs to the severed line would follow once supply had been secured through the rerouting measures. The outage was one of the more widespread short interruptions the north-east of the city has seen this summer, though its effects were largely over within the afternoon.