Power was restored late Saturday to parts of Bangladesh, 12 hours after an outage plunged Dhaka and other cities into darkness.
Loud cheers could be heard as the lights came back on in areas of the country's most populous city. Officials said they hoped to have power fully restored by early Sunday.
Authorities blamed the outage on the failure of a transmission line that brings electricity from India. Other reports said the blackout came after a failure at a power station that feeds the imported electricity into the national grid.
The outage silenced mosques that use loudspeakers to call for prayers five times a day. It also affected water supplies, because most pumps could not function.
This was Bangladesh's worst outage since 2007, when a powerful cyclone knocked out the national grid for several hours.
