Electricity restored to almost all affected regions as investigation under way into how outage occurred

Power has been restored to most of Chile’s 19 million people after the country’s most disruptive blackout in 15 years, the government said, as authorities lifted a strict curfew imposed when the outage left 98% of the population without electricity.

Chilean interior minister Carolina Tohá said on Wednesday that electricity had largely returned to Chile’s 14 afflicted regions, although 220,000 residents remained without power.