South Africans have gotten remarkably good at planning around load shedding — inverters, gas stoves, backup batteries for the router so the Wi-Fi survives Stage 4. What gets far less attention is that every power cut is also a small security event for your home network, and most people never notice, because nothing breaks in a way you can see.
Routers reboot into whatever state they were left in
When your router loses power and comes back, it reloads its saved configuration. If that configuration still has the default admin password the ISP shipped it with, every reboot is a fresh reminder that the front door was never actually locked — it just never got tested. Load shedding means South African routers get power-cycled far more often than routers almost anywhere else in the world, which means more opportunities for something to reconnect unexpectedly, and more reason to make sure the saved configuration is one you'd be comfortable with a stranger finding.
Backup power keeps insecure devices reachable for longer
A UPS or inverter keeping your router alive through an outage is a genuinely good idea — a dead connection during load shedding is its own kind of risk if you need to be reachable. But it has a side effect worth knowing about: any smart home device, old IP camera, or forgotten IoT gadget on your network that would normally just go dark during a power cut instead stays reachable the whole time, quietly exposed for longer than it would be without the backup power.
The router reset that fixes everything, including the things you forgot
If you've had your router for more than a couple of years, there's a reasonable chance a few small compromises have crept in — a guest network you set up once and forgot about, a port forwarding rule from a project that's long finished, a firmware version that's several updates behind. Load shedding gives you a natural moment to deal with this, because you're going to be power-cycling the thing anyway. Once every few months, during a scheduled outage, log into the router's admin page and actually look at what's configured: change the admin password if it's still the default, check the connected devices list for anything you don't recognise, and update the firmware if there's a pending version.
Public Wi-Fi becomes the default, not the backup
When home internet drops during an outage, many people shift to whatever public or shared Wi-Fi is available nearby — a coffee shop, a co-working space, a neighbour's inverter-backed connection. None of that is wrong, but it's worth treating those networks the way you would any unfamiliar Wi-Fi: avoid logging into banking apps on them where possible, and if you must, do it over your phone's own mobile data instead of the shared network.
The five-minute version
You don't need a security audit every time the lights go out. But the next scheduled load shedding slot is a genuinely good moment to log into your router once, confirm the admin password isn't still the factory default, and glance at what's connected. It costs less time than the outage itself, and it closes a gap that, thanks to how often South African routers get power-cycled, is more open here than almost anywhere else.