Nationwide power outage in Kenya over technical hitch

Kenya was plunged into darkness following a countrywide power outage early Saturday morning.

In a statement, Kenya Power said the outage occurred at 5.34 a.m following a technical hitch.

“…a technical hitch led to the tripping of our main supply line- Olkaria Nairobi 220KV leading to a power outage in most parts of the country,” the statement read.

“There is no time frame. Our team is yet to establish the cause of the outage but we assure you it will be rectified,” the State Corporation posted on its Twitter account.

Power was restored in North Rift, Western, South Nyanza, Mt Kenya and Central Kenya at 10 a.m.

Supply has also been restored in parts of Nairobi and Coast.

Kenya Power said it is working to restore supply in other regions

There were reports of flight delays at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) following the blackout.

A flight to Eldoret scheduled to depart at 6.30 a.m was delayed and left 7.20 a.m.

According to Kenya Airports Authority (KAA), generators meant to automatically provide power in case of a black out failed thus affecting its operations at JKIA.

"Our generators which are meant to automatically provide alternative power failed. We manually rectified the problem.

“Power is back at the airport and our teams are working on clearing the long queues being experienced. We are investigating to establish why the generators failed to automatically pick after this morning's outage,” KAA said in a post on its Twitter account.

The power outage also affected operations at the Port of Mombasa.

Kenya Ports Authority Managing Director Catherine Mturi-Wairi said they had to use cranes in the ships to offload cargo as they could not use the ones off-shore after the blackout.

"The Port has generators but the power is too low to power ship-to-shore cranes,” she said.