Pakistan suffered a massive power outage on Monday morning after a failure in the national power grid, leaving millions of people without electricity.
Power outages have occurred in all major centers of Pakistan, including the largest city of Karachi, the capital Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar. According to the Energy Minister, Khurrum Dastagir, the blackout is due to frequency changes in southern Pakistan.
He insisted that “this is not a serious crisis” and that power would soon be restored. Pakistan suffers from frequent power outages due to poor management and lack of investment in infrastructure. The last major power outage in October took several hours to recover.
The Energy Department said that around 7:30 a.m. local time, a frequency loss occurred on the network, resulting in significant damage. He added that work is underway to restore the system as soon as possible. Dastagir said that some networks in the country have been restored. However, electricity will be fully restored at 10 pm local time.