While Turkey started an investigation to find the reasons behind Tuesday's nationwide blackout, four of the five largest blackouts in history occurred due to technical problems.
The largest blackout in history occurred on July 30 to 31 in 2012, affecting some 620-670 million people in India - around 9 percent of the world's population.
Overloading, increased power withdrawn from the grid due to the extreme heat and electricity generation below average production levels were cited as the major reasons. In the incident, some 32 gigawatts of generating capacity were taken offline.
India was also home to the second biggest blackout in history, when 230 million people were affected on Jan. 2, 2001 in the north of the country due to limited supply and high demand on the grid.
The third biggest blackout took place in Bangladesh on Nov. 1, 2014 and afflicted around 150 million people when a 'technical glitch' caused further problems in the nation's power grid as many power plants shut down.
On Jan. 26, 2015, more than 140 million people in Pakistan, around 80 percent of the population experienced a blackout. Authorities blamed the attack on a separatist rebel group on the least developed Baluchistan province in the southwest of Pakistan.
On Aug. 18, 2015, Indonesia's most populous island Java, home to 57 percent of the 143 million inhabitants, and where the country's capital Jakarta is located, was hit by a blackout with another island to its east; Bali. The outage affected 100 million people when the grid failed in several points on the two islands causing the electricity supply to halve.
While the blackout in southern Brazil hit 97 million people in March 1999, the Nov. 2009 blackout affected 87 million people in Brazil and Paraguay in 2009.
Over 55 million people were affected by the northeast blackout in the U.S. and Canada on Aug. 14 and 15, 2003, while 50 million Europeans in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia experienced a blackout on Sep. 28, 2003.
By Ovunc Kutlu
Anadolu Agency
ovunc.kutlu@aa.com.tr