Cubans expressed alarm, with one resident saying it felt as if the country had reached the “bottom of the barrel.”

About half of Cuba was plunged into darkness on Thursday evening, followed by the entire island on Friday morning after one of the plants failed.

Cuba restored a trickle of power to its grid by mid-evening on Friday, officials said, hours after the island plunged into a countrywide blackout following the collapse of one of its major power plants.

HAVANA — Cuba on Friday was racing to restore electricity after the failure of the island's biggest power plant caused a nationwide blackout, coming on the heels of weeks of extended outages across the cash-strapped country.

Cuba’s electrical grid went offline after one of the island’s major power plant failed, the energy ministry said.

Cuba's national grid collapsed on Friday, leaving the entire population of 10 million people without electricity and underscoring the precarious state of the Communist-run country's infrastructure and economy.

The electric grid on the island of Cuba went entirely offline Friday after the failure of a major power plant east of Havana, government officials announced.

CubaDebate, one of the islands state-run media outlets, said Cuba`s grid operator, UNE, had reported at 6:15AM the "total disconnection of the national electro-energetic system." "The Electric Union is working on its reestablishment,

A growing energy crisis reached a crescendo Friday, as the country’s main power plant suddenly shut down, cutting off electricity to millions of Cubans.

Cuba was struggling to restore electricity nationwide on Saturday, more than 24 hours after the failure of one of its largest power plants knocked the entire grid off-line.