A power cut of several hours late on Monday in Qormi, Żebbuġ and Siġġiewi was caused by a lightning strike, Enemalta said.

The lightning strike caused extensive damage to an overhead line circuit.

Whilst repairs on the damaged infrastructure were still underway, a cable fault caused by a failed joint occurred at 9.10pm affecting less than 2.5% of the national customer base, mostly in Żebbuġ and parts of  Mrieħel, Birkirkara and Qormi.

6.5% of households had power restored within an hour while 45% were energised in less than two hours. The remaining 48.5% had their power restored before midnight, Enemalta said.

During the restoration process, areas in Attard also experienced an outage with less than 1,500 households being affected. All affected areas were energised in less than 90 minutes.

A short time after power had been restored to all customers, shortly before 1am on Tuesday, a third fault developed on an underground cable at Marsa that was feeding some of the areas that had been affected by the previous faults. Enemalta personnel restored supply to all areas within 90 minutes.