48m without electricity as power down in all of Argentina and Uruguay
Around 50m people were thought to be without electricity yesterday as a major fault shut down power in the whole of Argentina.
The country’s grid “collapsed” early in the morning, authorities said. Meanwhile, supplies were affected in neighbouring Paraguay and Uruguay.
Energy distribution company Edesur Argentina, tweeted this morning that a massive failure in the electrical interconnection system left the countries without power.
The three countries are home to 55m people.
The cause of the outages was unclear last night, but authorities said they were looking into what happened.
Power slowly started returning to homes across the country, but were expected to last into the night in some places.
“The city is a disaster. There are no traffic lights. Stores aren’t open. It spoiled Father’s Day,” said Liliana Comis, a resident in Buenos Aires.
The outage is believed to be one of the worst power cuts in world history. Neighbouring Brazil is often plague by power cuts.