The sudden outage caught many of the island’s 24 million residents off guard. Science parks in the cities of Hsinchu and Tainan appeared to be mostly unaffected by the outages, according to the news agency. The Taipower spokesman said that the scale of the outage on Thursday appeared to be smaller than a 2017 islandwide power blackout. Thursday’s outage came as Taiwan has been racing to subdue a recent outbreak of the coronavirus. On Wednesday, the island’s health authorities announced 16 cases of local transmission, the highest single-day total since the pandemic began.

Source: New York Times May 13, 2021 09:34 UTC