São Paulo, Oct. 14, 2025 (Lusa) - A blackout, caused by a fire at a substation in the Amazon region, affected a large part of Brazil in the early hours of Tuesday morning, including São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the government said.
There was a power outage in at least 14 of the country's 27 states, including the three most populous: São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro.
Pernambuco, Bahia, Amazonas, Santa Catarina, Goiás, Rio Grande do Norte, Maranhão, Paraíba, Sergipe, Rondónia and Brasília are also among the states affected, according to the Globo group's G1 portal.
The Ministry of Mines and Energy said in a statement that at 00:32 local time (04:32 Lisbon time) there was a "major disturbance in the National Interconnected System, which caused the controlled disconnection of around 10,000 MW of load".
According to the ministry, the outage was caused by a fire at a substation in the state of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon, which generated a "serious contingency" in the south, southeast, centre and west of the country.
The service was re-established in a controlled manner and, by 02:30 this morning (06:30 in Lisbon), the incident had been resolved across all affected areas.
The National Electricity System Operator (ONS), which is responsible for coordinating generation and transmission throughout the country, said that once it had identified the problem, it began a series of actions in the sector to "restore power".
The Brazilian government is due to meet today with the players in the electricity sector to analyse the situation.
The Enel company, which operates in São Paulo, said in a statement that the cut occurred within the framework of the "regional load relief plan", used to avoid blackouts or overloads, which is under the responsibility of the National System Operator.
"The load shedding procedure occurs automatically when any incident in the National Interconnected System is identified, to protect the electricity system," explained the statement, published in the Folha de São Paulo newspaper.
In some cases, the blackout lasted only a few minutes, although in others it lasted for an hour.
In the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, distributor Light reported that the blackout left around half a million customers without power for just over an hour.
On social media, several users also reported power outages in their cities.
One of the last major blackouts in Brazil, Latin America's largest economy, occurred in August 2023.
On that occasion, the supply of 16,000 megawatts to the national grid was interrupted, representing 26% of the existing load at the time.
This blackout affected almost every state in the country, except the Amazonian state of Roraima (in the north), which at the time was the only state not connected to the national system and was dependent on the Venezuelan grid.
MAV/ADB // ADB.
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