‘Never before’: MILLIONS left without power as Argentina & Uruguay hit by nationwide blackouts

16 Jun, 2019 13:53 / Updated 5 years ago

Entire cities descended into darkness as a massive, first-of-its-kind blackout swept across Argentina and Uruguay over the weekend. While power has been restored in Argentina, it has yet to fully return in Uruguay.

Argentina suffered a “nationwide” blackout, which also affected neighboring Uruguay, Alejandra Martinez, a spokesperson for the Buenos Aires-based electricity supplier company Edesur, told local media. “Something like this has never happened before,” she said.

The blackout itself, which affected as many as 44 million people, started at 7:07am local time on Sunday. It took the company around 10 hours to restore services to households after 5:30pm. The company had earlier explained that the massive power outage occurred due to a failure in the electrical interconnection system.

Neighboring Uruguay, with a population of roughly four million, also suffered a power outage at the same time. The utility company, UTE, had managed to restore 98.5 percent of its service "from zero" by 6:30pm. The firm said that works would continue “until dawn.”

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Paraguay, Brazil and Chine also reported localized losses of power throughout the day.

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