Lights Back On In Bangladesh After Nationwide Blackout

Electricity has been restored in Bangladesh a day after the impoverished South Asian country was thrust into darkness by a nationwide outage.

The country's energy grid was fully restored, and any further problems that may arise would be for "local reasons," Junior Power Minister Nasrul Hamid told reporters, according to The Associated Press.

As we reported earlier, a link that supplies Bangladesh's power grid with electricity from neighboring India failed on Saturday. That's one theory. Another is an unexpected dip in the Indian supply.

In any case, attempts to restore power met with only limited success before officials finally made a breakthrough late Saturday and were able to restore electricity to about 80 percent of the country. The nationwide outage lasted more than 8 hours.

The AP says: "The blackout was Bangladesh's most severe since a 2007 cyclone knocked out the national grid for several hours, and once again exposed inefficient and dated infrastructure that has held back development."