"Grid down" refers to the electrical grid not working; more widespread than a simpler local power outage. A shorter-duration example was the East Coast power outage of 2003:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003There is a widely debated concern that a repeat of the Carrington Event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event#:~:text=The%20Carrington%20Event%20was%20a,largest%20geomagnetic%20storm%20on%20record.
would be much more crippling due to the greater dependency on electrical power for almost all of modern life, the challenges of replacing the many burned out transformers one sees at electrical substations (built on demand, apparently mainly in Scandanavia, wait time is a year, thousands to replace), and other factors.
A nuclear weapon, detonated at high altitude, could accomplish the same, or worse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulseA fairly recent book by William Forstchen: "One Second After" describes the aftermath of such an attack, as does his follow-up book "One Year After".
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