Ecuador hit by nationwide power outage, minister says

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.

Public Works Minister Roberto Luque blamed the power cut on the breakdown of a transmission line.

The subway system in the capital, Quito, ground to a halt and traffic lights stopped working around mid-afternoon local time on Wednesday.

The government later said 95% of the country’s electricity had returned.

Posting on X soon after the blackout, Mr Luque, who is also acting energy minister, said: “There is a failure in the transmission line that caused a chain of disconnections, so there’s no electricity nationwide.”

“The incident must have been major because it even knocked out power to the metro, which has its own separate system,” Quito Mayor Pabel Muñoz said on X.

The Quito Metro said that services were interrupted “due to a general failure of the national interconnected electrical energy system”.

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 the Expresso newspaper.

Business owners were also left disgruntled, with Guayaquil hairdresser Diana Rosales – who was in the middle of cutting someone’s hair when the blackout happened – stating: “It’s not fair that we continue to have terrible service when we pay a lot of bills.”

Night classes were also suspended at educational institutions across the country and taken online, the ministry of education said.

In April, a drought forced the government to announce a series of planned blackouts that left major cities without power for hours on end.

Most of the country’s energy comes from neighbouring Colombia.