CARACAS - Power was restored across Venezuela after a massive 12-hour outage plunged the entire country into darkness.
The government has blamed "sabotage" by opposition forces protesting what they say was fraud in the widely disputed elections a month ago that left President Nicolas Maduro in charge.
Blackouts are not uncommon in Venezuela -- though many experts attribute them to official corruption and a lack of investment in distribution networks.
This week's problem originated early Friday at the Simon Bolivar hydroelectric plant, Venezuela's chief source of power.
Maduro called it "the father and the mother of all attacks" against the facility. He accused "fascists," as he calls the opposition, and the United States of being behind the outage, but offered no evidence.
The prolonged power failure revived memories of a massive 2019 blackout that lasted several days.
Electricity began returning to some states around 4:00 pm (2000 GMT) Friday and had been restored to nearly the entire country by Saturday morning, according to local media and users contacted by AFP.
Metro service in Caracas was back to normal, transport authorities said.
Internet connectivity was around 93 percent by dawn Saturday, according to the NGO VE Sin Filtro, which monitors internet connection levels.
Jose Aquilar, an expert in risk in the electrical utilities sector, said the outage likely stemmed from a breakdown of some kind in the country's decrepit grid -- not sabotage.
"The failure should not have led to something major, but the Venezuelan electricity system is so precarious that one thing led to another," he told AFP, "and the distribution networks were affected."