Around 4 million households in Taiwan were hit by rolling blackouts after a grid malfunction at the Singda Power Plant in the Yongan District of Kaohsiung, local reports said Friday.
Taiwan Power Co., the state-controlled electric company, launched the rolling power outages at 3 p.m. local time Thursday and power supply was restored at around 8 p.m. after emergency repairs.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world's largest microchip manufacturer by sales, said some of its facilities suffered a "brief power dip" but power had been restored.
In Hsinchu, 150,000 homes lost electricity and, in the southern city of Tainan, 14 districts were affected, the state-run Central News Agency reported.
Firefighters rescued more than 400 people trapped in elevators, many of them in northern Taiwan, Reuters said.
In a news briefing in Taipei, Taipower representative Chang Ting-shu said the blackouts weren't caused by power usage exceeding supply but a grid issue.
"Rumors that we ran out of power or something went wrong with the Singda plant are false," the Times quoted Chang as saying. "This is a grid malfunction."
Standby power generators, including nuclear facilities, were activated to fill the gap left by the Singda malfunction, Chang said.
Chang said there would be an investigation into the cause.
The last significant blackout in Taiwan was Aug. 15, 2017, and was caused by a natural gas supply disruption at the Datan power facility in Taoyuan, the Times said.
