Syria blackout: power expected to be restored by midnight

The Syrian media reported that the country's power grid collapsed at about 2 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, cutting off the supply of electricity to the entire country. The blackout caused serious disruptions of Syria's cellular networks, which can operate for a limited time using backup batteries, and of Internet services that rely on the power supply. After three hours in which the entire power grid was down, the flow of electricity slowly resumed but it was not expected to return to the previous level until midnight. The exact cause of the nationwide outage has yet to be disclosed.