Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Energy said the outage was triggered by an accident in the interconnected regional power system. The ministry did not identify the country where the initial incident occurred.
Power supplies were being restored gradually. By 4:32 p.m., electricity had been restored to 80% of consumers in Surkhandarya region, while repair and recovery efforts were continuing in other affected areas.
National Electric Grid of Uzbekistan JSC said several levels of the grid’s emergency protection system had kicked in following the incident.
The disruption was also reported in major cities across neighboring countries. Widespread outages were reported in Bishkek, Almaty and Dushanbe.
In Kazakhstan, an emergency protection system on transmission lines operated by KEGOC was triggered, disconnecting 300 MW of capacity. The outage affected Almaty and 10 districts of Almaty region, while the city’s metro service was also disrupted.
The simultaneous outages point to a disturbance in the interconnected Central Asian power system rather than separate local failures.
The region’s electricity grids operate in parallel and are interconnected, allowing countries to exchange power and balance supply and demand. A similar large-scale failure in January 2022 caused widespread outages in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and parts of southern Kazakhstan.
