Tens of millions of people in Pakistan were left without electricity on Monday, the power ministry said, reporting a second “major breakdown” of the national grid during the last three months. A senior ministry official blamed this outage, and the frequent blackouts that Pakistan’s 220 million people suffer, on its ageing grid.

Factories, hospitals and schools across the country were without power for hours after a voltage fluctuation in the grid between the cities of Jamshoro and Dadu in southern Sindh province, power minister Khurrum Dastagir said. “There was a fluctuation in voltage and the systems were shut down one by one. This is not a major crisis,” Dastagir told Geo TV news channel.