NEW YORK (AFP) – A massive outage blacked out Argentina and Uruguay on Sunday (June 16), leaving both South American countries, with a population of about 48 million people, without electricity, power companies said.

Uruguay’s system went down at 7:06 am local time (6:06 pm Singapore time), according to the Uruguayan power company UTE, which attributed the outage to “a fault in the Argentine network”.

Two Argentine power companies confirmed the failure knocked out electricity throughout Argentina, without specifying the cause. “A massive failure in the electrical interconnection system left all Argentina and Uruguay without power,” Edesur Argentina said on Twitter.

Edenor, Argentina’s largest electricity distributor, attributed the outage to a “general failure in the interconnection system.”

UTE said the failure left Uruguay’s “entire national territory without service, as well as several provinces of the neighbour country.”

More than an hour after the blackout, UTE said its system was being brought back “from zero”.

“Some coastal cities already have service and work continues toward general restoration (of power),” it said.

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