High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The July 2012 India blackout was the largest power outage in history, occurring as two separate events on 30 and 31 July 2012. The outage affected over 620 million people, about 9% of the world population, or half of India`s population, spread across 22 states in Northern, Eastern, and Northeast India. An estimated 32 gigawatts of generating capacity was taken offline in the outage. An article in The Wall Street Journal stated that of the affected population, 320 million initially had power, while the rest of the affected population lacked direct access.