Power is being gradually restored in major cities in Pakistan after the country was hit by a major electricity blackout.
The electricity distribution system in the country of more than 210 million people is a complex – and delicate, network, and a problem in one section of the network can lead to cascading failures across the country.
The last blackout was caused by “an engineering failure” in southern Pakistan at 11:41 pm (1841 GMT) on Saturday, which shut down the system and caused the plants to close, said Energy Minister Omar Ayub Khan, at a press conference in Islamabad.
“Our experts are trying to determine the exact location of the failure, which we have not been able to discover.”
Khan said that this would take “a few more hours as the area is still covered in dense fog”, and that the power supply has been partially restored in most areas of Punjab, the most populous province, as well as in the economic center of Karachi , in the south.
The blackout had plunged all major cities in Pakistan into darkness, including the capital Islamabad, Karachi and the second largest city, Lahore.
There were no immediate reports of outages in hospitals, which often rely on backup generators.
A spokesman for the water and energy ministry said electricity had been restored in some parts of the country, but many areas in Lahore and Karachi were still waiting.
NetBlocks, which monitors Internet outages, said online connectivity in the country had collapsed as a result of the blackout. Connectivity was at “62% of normal levels”, tweeted.
This was Pakistan’s second largest energy collapse in less than three years. In May 2018, the power supply was partially interrupted for more than nine hours.
In 2015, an apparent rebel attack on a major power line plunged about 80% of Pakistan into darkness.
This blackout, one of the worst in Pakistan’s history, caused a power cut in major cities in the country, including Islamabad, and affected one of the country’s international airports.