Something about this has been nagging at me since you posted. I actually kept a rough log of local anomalies back around that period - mostly for cross-referencing with any UAP activity in the Sussex area - and flicking back through it now, there are a couple of entries where I noted the street lights on my road flickering badly on nights that don't correspond to any weather events I recorded.
Whether that connects to scheduled maintenance windows is another question, but the timing overlap you're describing is worth documenting properly.
A few things worth considering:
Who issues those maintenance schedules? Local authority, national grid, or third party contractors? The chain of accountability matters if you're trying to trace decisions., Were the outages localised or widespread? Pinpoint outages affecting specific streets rather than whole districts are harder to explain as standard grid work., Any corroborating reports? Local Facebook groups and Nextdoor are actually decent archives for this - people complain loudly about power cuts.
I'd be cautious about jumping straight to coordinated interference, but I'm also not dismissing it. There's a pattern I've noticed across multiple research areas where mundane-sounding official explanations get used as cover scheduling - whether for military exercises, signal testing, or something else entirely.
Has anyone tried submitting a Freedom of Information request to their regional network operator? That's probably the most solid first step before we start theorising too heavily. Would be interested to see what others are finding across different parts of the country - particularly whether these dates cluster around any particular months.