Pakistani Twitter goes into meme overdrive after nation faces massive power outage

Amid severe economic crisis, Pakistan faced a major power outage on Monday.  Several major cities including the capital Islamabad were left without electricity supply for hours due to a fault in the transmission line, according to news agency ANI.

Pakistan’s Energy Minister Khurrum Dastagir gave his statement to Reuters stating that the outage was caused by a large voltage surge in the south of the grid, which affected the entire network.

Confirming the news, Pakistan’s Geo News reported that several areas in Karachi as well as Lahore were without electricity.

The reason behind this power failure happened as two transmission lines from Guddu to Quetta tipped, as per Quetta Electric Supply Company (QESCO). The company further added that at least 22 districts of Balochistan, including Quetta have no power.

Later, supplies were being partially restored from the north to the south, he added, nearly six hours after factories, hospitals and schools reported outages. The grid should be fully functioning by 10 pm (1700 GMT), Dastagir said,

Earlier this month, Pakistan had announced a new energy conservation plan as its fragile economy continues to struggle with multiple challenges such as the country’s foreign exchange reserves have dwindles to alarmingly low levels.

This is the sceond time that such incident is happening. Last year in October, Pakistan had experienced a major power breakdown which in turn had deprived large swathyes of the country for the more than 12 hours.

China has invested heavily in Pakistan’s power sector as part of a $60 billion infrastructure scheme that feeds into Beijing’s “Belt and Road” initiative to develop land and sea trade routes in Asia and beyond.

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