On the afternoon of June 9, Tartu and nearby areas lost electricity. Reports of outages came from Annelinn, Veeriku, Ülejõe, Raadi, Karlova and the City Center. Traffic lights were out and traffic stopped. People in other parts of South Estonia also reported losing power.

Residents said one of Estonia's largest hospitals, Tartu University Hospital, was also without electricity.

"An event with such an impact usually does not arise from a single cause. On June 9, several unfavorable circumstances coincided and amplified one another. Although the identified errors involved the actions of our cooperation partner, we consider the incident to fall within Elering's area of responsibility," said Elering board member Reigo Kebja.

The outage occurred while scheduled maintenance work was underway in the area, which meant the grid was temporarily operating with a smaller reserve than usual. At the same time, a technical malfunction occurred in device control and several mistakes were made. The combination of these factors led to the power outage in Tartu and its surroundings.

Elering resolved the outage in its system within 20 minutes. The outage began at 5:07 p.m., the first customers were reconnected at 5:15 p.m., and the last Elering substation affected by the incident was re-energized at 5:27 p.m.

After that, restoration continued in the distribution network. Elektrilevi gradually restored electricity to end users starting at 5:45 p.m.

"Based on what happened, we will review our processes and oversight to reduce the likelihood of similar situations occurring again," Kebja added.

The last comparable incident in Elering's network occurred seven years ago in Narva.

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