Large swaths of Bangladesh were left without electricity on Tuesday, the government's power utility company said.

The partial grid failure affected at least 130 million people of the country's about 168 million.

What do we know about the grid failure?

Bangladesh's power grid malfunctioned at about 2 p.m. local time (0800 GMT) on Tuesday.

This led to blackouts across 75-80% of Bangladesh, Power Development Board official Shameen Hasan told Reuters.

Hasan said utilities were currently producing around 4,500 megawatts of power, while nationwide demand was at 14,200 megawatts.

Bangladesh's peak power demand on Tuesday was 3% higher than forecast, according to government data.

The cause of the blackouts remained unclear, the Power Development Board said.

Junior Technology Minister Zunaid Palak said power would be restored by late evening in Dhaka, a city of more than 22 million inhabitants.

Bangladesh facing frequent power cuts

Bangladesh last witnessed a major unscheduled blackout in 2014, when about 70% of the country was without power for almost 10 hours.

Many parts of Bangladesh have been facing frequent power cuts this year.

Bangladesh has been hit hard by soaring global natural gas prices in recent months. Natural gas makes up nearly three-quarters of the country's power generation, and Dhaka has had to impose regular service cuts to conserve electricity.

Some of the power cuts in July lasted up to 13 hours. At least three protesters were killed by security forces during demonstrations about the outages and the rise of the cost of living.

sdi/rt (AFP, Reuters)