YEREVAN -- Armenia's Ministry of Local Government and Infrastructure has blamed massive power outages that hit the country on a voltage drop in the national power grid.
"Currently, there are no frequency fluctuations in the system, stability has been restored," the ministry said on July 10. "Efforts [to eliminate the consequences of the emergency] continue, power supply is gradually being restored."
The ministry also said a working group will be set up to investigate the causes and determine the source of the problem.
"The public will be additionally informed about the results [of the investigation]," the ministry said.
Earlier, Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinian said in a Facebook post that outages were "possible across the republic" because of a failure in the country's power grid. "Efforts are under way for the problem to be resolved by 7 p.m.," he said.
Amid outages and voltage drops experienced in Yerevan and elsewhere in the country, power was also cut in the Yerevan subway earlier on July 10.
Yerevan Deputy Mayor Hakob Karapetian said on Facebook that the "power supply along the entire length of the subway was interrupted due to voltage drops in the network."
"At some sections, trains were stranded inside the tunnels. Then the power supply was partially restored, and the trains that stopped between stations managed to arrive at the stations where passengers were evacuated," Karapetian said.
"The situation is under control. The work of the subway has been suspended until the resolution of the power-supply problem," he said.
Armenia has experienced similar or even worse power outages before.
In November 2013, the country suffered its worst power outage in nearly two decades as a result of what the authorities then called a brief disruption in electricity supplies from neighboring Iran.
