The 2003 Northeast Blackout shows how the outage of a single generator triggered a chain reaction of power failures affecting ~50 million people.

Evidence

Threshold for the Outbreak of Cascading Failures in Degree-degree Uncorrelated Networks (arXiv)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Extreme misfortune can have cascading negative effects on families. — Crews, Harry, A childhood the biography of a place, 21