More than 140 million people left without power in Bangladesh due to grid failure

More than 140 million citizens of Bangladesh have been left without power this Tuesday due to a blackout caused by a fault in one of the main high-voltage lines of the power grid of the country, which has about 168 million inhabitants.

The national power grid suffered the fault at around 14.00 (local time), according to the Bangladesh Development Council, which said the system failed mainly in the east of the country. The problem has led to supply disruptions in a large part of the regions.

Sources close to the matter have explained in statements to ‘The Daily Star’ newspaper that the problem has not yet been solved, although they have managed to restore electricity to about 25 percent of affected households after four hours of work.

The outage has also caused the interruption of Internet service, as well as cell phone service. About 8,000 telephone towers are in areas affected by the outage, although some of them have generators and will remain operational.