ISLAMABAD – Pakistan has plunged into darkness after a power transmission system fault in the early morning caused a nationwide outage, according to officials.
“Electricity blackout in the country due to sudden drop in the frequency of power transmission system resulting in a widespread breakdown,” the Energy Ministry said in a tweet early on Monday.
“System maintenance work is progressing rapidly,” it added, reported German news agency dpa.
Energy Minister Khurram Dastagir told local media that the power generation system is currently closed down at night since there is less demand nationwide in winter.
“However, when the systems were turned on in the morning today, frequency variation and voltage fluctuation was observed in the south of the country,” he said.
The minister said that it might take at least 12 hours to restore the power supply to the entire country.
The hashtag #poweroutage was trending on social media with some people holding the coalition government led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif responsible for the failure.
Pakistan is facing a default risk due to fast shrinking foreign exchange reserves, last year’s devastating floods and the global economic slowdown.
The power breakdown is one of the worst the country has experienced, with outages in all major cities including the capital. – Bernama
