DHAKA - At least 130 million people in Bangladesh were without power on Tuesday, after a grid failure caused widespread blackouts, the government's power utility company said.
More than 80 per cent of the country was affected by the sudden outage shortly after 2 pm local time 0800 GMT, according to the Power Development Board.
The rest of the country is without power agency spokesman Shamim Ahsan, apart from some locations in Bangladesh's northwest.
It remained unclear what caused the fault, as 130 million people or more were without electricity.
He said a technical malfunction was the likely reason that it was under investigation.
Technology minister Zunaid Palak said on Facebook that power would be restored by 8 pm in the capital Dhaka, which is home to more than 22 million people.
In the past few months, Bangladesh has suffered a major power crisis because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The South Asian nation is struggling to pay for enough imported diesel and gas to meet electricity demand due to public anger over long blackouts.
In November 2014, Bangladesh saw a major unscheduled blackout, when around 70 per cent of the country went without power for nearly 10 hours.