Taiwan president pledges ‘infrastructure check-up’ after mass power outage

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen on Friday vowed to scrutinize power infrastructure and accelerate ongoing efforts to improve grid reliability after a mass outage that left one-third of the island without electricity.

Taiwan on Thursday blamed negligence during annual maintenance at a major power plant for the outage across the island that caused the lights to go off for more than 5 million households, though the crucial semiconductor sector was largely unaffected.

“The national security team has been conducting examinations on the resilience of key infrastructure, and yesterday’s incident is one of the cases that needed to be scrutinized closely,” Tsai said in a statement.