Ecuador was hit by a nationwide blackout on Wednesday, a senior government minister said,
leaving some 18 million people in the dark for several hours.
The subway system in the capital, Quito, ground to a halt and traffic lights stopped working around mid-afternoon local time on Wednesday.
Shortly after the power was restored, Public Works Minister Roberto Luque blamed the outage on a lack of investment in electrical systems.
Writing on X, he said it was "just more proof of the energy crisis we're dealing with".
"For years we have stopped investing in these systems and today we are experiencing the consequences," he added.
In April, a drought forced the government to announce a series of planned blackouts that left major cities without power for hours on end.Quito Mayor Pabel Muñoz described Wednesday's incident as "major", explaining: "it even knocked out power to the metro, which has its own separate system."The Quito metro said that services were interrupted "due to a general failure of the national interconnected electrical energy system".
The outage left residents disgruntled, with Guayaquil hairdresser Diana Rosales - who was in the middle of cutting someone's hair when the blackout happened - telling newspaper Expresso: "It's not fair that we continue to have terrible service when we pay a lot of bills."
Local media reported that access to drinking water was suspended in some areas, with some residents expressing their frustration at the lack of warning of the suspension.
"Now I have to work miracles with the bottle that I have at home," Guayas resident Andrew Medina told Expresso.
Night classes were also suspended at educational institutions across the country and taken online, the ministry of education said.
Some hours after the outage occurred, Mr Luque announced that 95% of the country's electricity had returned.He had earlier blamed the blackout on the failure of a transmission line.Most of the country's energy comes from neighbouring Colombia.
Comment: Associated Press reports:
Much of New Zealand's far north is without power after a transmission tower fell over
Much of the northernmost part of New Zealand is without power after a transmission tower toppled over in a rural area on Thursday, with no indication when power will be fully restored to the area.
The 220-kV tower fell "unexpectedly" in a field, a spokesperson for the national grid operator, Transpower, said in a statement. It was not clear why the tower fell over.

© Taran Marsh-Goudie via APA fallen power pylon lies in a farm paddock near Kumeu north of Auckland, New Zealand, Thursday, June 20, 204. Much of the northernmost part of New Zealand is without power after a transmission tower toppled over in a rural area on Thursday, with no firm indication for when it will be restored.
The tower carried two separate high-capacity circuits that supplied most of the power to the remote Northland region, which has a population of 195,000. Officials suggested 180,000 people were without power, Radio New Zealand reported.
Power had been restored to some through the use of a lower-capacity network, but most of the region's homes and businesses — more than 70,000 — were still without electricity hours after the outage, the two power companies servicing Northland told The Associated Press.
The region's emergency management agency advised residents to conserve water and New Zealand police urged people not to travel by road unless necessary.
The outage occurred just over a year after New Zealand's ageing power grid experienced its worst-ever damage during a deadly cyclone in February 2023, which battered Northland, cutting power to the region and devastating farmland. Local politicians in the area have long sought more government funding for its crumbling infrastructure.
Whilst it's true infrastructure in a great many places across the planet has been neglected in recent years, particularly in the West, there's also evidence that some of these blackouts - as well as explosions, fires, and system failures - which appear to be on the rise in recent years, are also due to sabotage; it remains to be seen whether we will find out which is applicable in these most recent incidents.
The following is just a small selection of incidents that have occurred in just the last 6 months or so:
Comment: Associated Press reports: Whilst it's true infrastructure in a great many places across the planet has been neglected in recent years, particularly in the West, there's also evidence that some of these blackouts - as well as explosions, fires, and system failures - which appear to be on the rise in recent years, are also due to sabotage; it remains to be seen whether we will find out which is applicable in these most recent incidents.
The following is just a small selection of incidents that have occurred in just the last 6 months or so: