World

Argentina investigates 'unprecedented' outage

June 18, 2019 6:40 am

Argentina is investigating what caused a massive power cut that hit nearly 50 million people.

President Mauricio Macri called the outage “unprecedented”, promising a thorough inquiry.

Almost all of Argentina, neighbouring Uruguay and some areas of Paraguay woke up to darkness on Sunday.

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The disruption hit public transport while hospitals were forced to run on generators. Power had largely been restored by the end of the day.

Argentine officials said it began with a failure in the country’s “interconnection system” but that the exact cause was unknown.

Energy Minister Gustavo Lopetegui said it was unlikely that a cyber-attack was responsible, and that it would take 10-15 days for the results of the investigation to be published.

Despite the massive outage he said the country’s electrical network was “very robust”.