A massive blackout affected hundreds of thousands of users Saturday night in neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, causing traffic light failures and leaving people trapped in elevators, requiring the intervention of firefighters of the Argentinian capital.

At its peak at 9:45 p.m. local time, the outage reached 519,472 users of Edenor and 78,125 of Edesur, according to reports from the National Electricity Regulatory Entity (ENRE). Within Edesur’s concession area, the hardest-hit zones included La Paternal, Flores, Floresta, Villa del Parque, Vélez Sarsfield, Caballito and Villa Santa Rita, with outages also reported in Palermo, Belgrano, Villa Urquiza and Villa Devoto.

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At 9:30 p.m., Edesur communicated that service had been normalized for customers affected by a system failure unrelated to its company, specifying that tonight’s incident reached a group of customers in the southern and northern areas of the AMBA, some of them within its distribution concession area.

Restoration unfolded that same night. In Edenor’s area, the number of affected users fell from more than 500,000 to 24,094, then to just over 2,000, until full service restoration was achieved. Edesur reduced users without power to 70,272 by around 10:00 p.m. and to 69,013 minutes later, achieving general normalization near 10:20 p.m. After 11:00 p.m., electricity supply was regularized for the vast majority of the population, with only 891 account holders remaining to be reconnected.

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