Businesses suffered considerable financial loss, staff had to work from home or move to other offices, and about 6000 apartment residents had to find alternative accommodation.
The only winners were generator businesses - for weeks, Queen St throbbed to the sound of hundreds of generators.
The initial failure was put down to the unseasonably hot and dry weather, but really, the cables should have been replaced earlier.
In 2006, half of Auckland was blacked out for most of the day after a cable fell on a transmission line at the Otahuhu substation.
And in 2009, 280,000 homes and businesses lost power when a fork-lift moving a container hit overhead power lines. The back-up line didn't kick in because maintenance was being carried out.
John Banks, Auckland mayor at the time, said the cuts were Third World and he was at the end of his tether with Transpower.
Transpower reassured the public the project to secure the power supply to Auckland and Northland would be completed by 2013.
Chief executive Patrick Strange, speaking to the Herald at the time, said: "It means that you could lose the cable or both circuits and we would have time to restore supply without affecting customers."
Cut - quite literally - to last Sunday, and we have an outage that cripples large parts of the eastern suburbs and shuts two of Auckland's biggest malls. Again - apparently - it's just one of those things.
When natural disasters occur, and storms bring down power lines, you can understand it. But it's hard to understand why Transpower hasn't been able to institute a belt and braces system.
There is no excuse for New Zealand's largest city being left in the dark.
A secure supply of electricity is not a luxury in a First World country. It's a necessity - right up there with water. When the power fails it's the small and medium-sized businesses that bear the cost. Not the Transpower chief executive, who is paid $1.050 million a year.
Key says that if we want a platinum power supply service we have to pay for it.
But clearly the money we've been paying over decades has been going to the salaries of the board and the chief executive - not on the vital maintenance and upgrading that a modern city requires to function.
The Daily Mail's headline screamed: "Expert's devastating 20-year study finally demolishes claims that smoking pot is harmless."
You've got to love a good screaming Daily Mail headline. They reduce 20 years of research into a crowd-pleasing attention-grabber. And it's bollocks.
Smoking copious amounts of cannabis when you're a teenager can cause irreparable damage - even the most hardened dope-heads know that. Just as we all know that drinking to excess while a teenager can cause terrible damage, too.
Some young people will be horribly affected by dope, to the point they develop psychosis; some young people will die from over-consumption of alcohol.
When people ask you, "What's your poison?" they mean it quite literally.
I've never been a dope smoker. I started work with the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation at 18 and my contract forbade taking illegal drugs. I valued my job more than a spliff, so I never did dope.
Besides, I didn't get stoners. They were so - meh. In the corner, nodding to a rhythm only they could hear.
Give me loud, in your face drunks any day. I concede that to many people, drunks are far uglier and more dangerous than stoners. But the way our laws are written, drink is legal and dope is not.
That may change - possibly in my lifetime. And I believe society may well be a better place for it.
But what would I know? I thought lowering the drinking age to 18 was a good idea.
But when the subeditor of the Daily Mail wrote that sanctimonious headline, I wonder how many wines he had on board?
• Kerre McIvor is on Newstalk ZB, Monday-Thursday, 8pm to midnight
