A power line failure left thousands of people across four Central America countries without electricity.
The fault on the region’s grid caused a complete blackout for more than an hour in Nicaragua and Honduras, as well as power cuts in parts of Guatemala and El Salvador.
The four nations have shared a linked electricity network – the Central America Electrical Interconnection System (SIEPAC) – since the late 1980s, along with Costa Rica and Panama, who were unaffected during the outage.
A statement from EOR, the electricity operator in El Salvador, confirmed: “At 11:48 (17:48GMT) there was an emergency in the Central American Electrical System due to a failure in the 230 kV transmission supply line in Honduras.
“A full blackout took place in the electrical systems of Nicaragua and Honduras.”
He said: “When the fault occurred, it was a time of maximum demand, therefore the protection systems decided that to prevent damage to the transmission lines it was better to disconnect.”
It took four hours for 35% of Nicaragua’s energy system to recover, while 95% of Honduras was back online in the same timeframe.
The incident in Central America comes just a couple of months after nearly 50 million people in South America were left in the dark after a blackout hit Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.
