‘Pakistan ko restart kar rahe hai’: Pakistanis make light with memes as electricity outage cripples life

Amid a major power breakdown in Pakistan, social media users have taken to Twitter to make light of the moment. On Monday, Pakistan’s national grid suffered a breakdown, leaving large swathes of the country in the dark, including financial capital Karachi to the capital Islamabad, the eastern city of Lahore and Peshawar in the north. Millions were left without electricity for hours following the power outage.

Power minister Khurrum Dastagir told news agency Reuters that the power cut was the result of a large voltage surge in the south of the grid that ended up affecting the entire network.

As things stand now, the government is aiming to restore electricity by 10 pm. Dastagir said that they are trying their utmost to restore electricity before that.

But what would people do till then? Share memes, of course!

This is the second major outage in three months. The last major outage in Pakistan took place in October and took hours to restore. The reason behind these frequent power failures could be its aging grid and increasing demand.

"There's an underlying weakness in the system. Generators are too far from the load centres and transmission lines are too long and insufficient," said an official who did not want to be named, as per Reuters.

Many people in Peshawar and Karachi said that they were unable to get drinking water or take a shower as they were unable to start their pumps. Telecom companies and hospitals switched on their back-up generators.

Also read: Pakistan power outage: Parts of Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi in dark for hours