Did the OP get eaten?
Well then I’ll answer the U.S. blackout before 1900 - pretty much the entire country had no lights!
The OP got caught in a blackout, not eaten 
The biggest blackout that I’m aware of was the one that struck the northeast in the 70’s. Before then the nation’s power systems were all independant. It wasn’t until they tied them all together on a grid that this sort of blackout (a cascading failure) became possible.