Bangladesh faces power blackout after national grid fails

A failure in Bangladesh’s national power grid plunged much of the country into a blackout on Tuesday, officials said.

Officials of the state-run Bangladesh Power Development Board said that power transmission failed somewhere in the eastern part of the country. All power plants tripped and electricity was cut in the capital, Dhaka, and other big cities, said Shameem Hasan, a power department spokesman.

Engineers were trying to determine where and why the glitches happened and it could take hours to restore the system, he said.