CNN
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Cuba experienced its second nationwide power outage on Saturday morning, hours after officials said power was slowly being restored.

“At 6:15 a.m. there was another total failure of the national electric power system,” said a post on the official Telegram channel of the Cuba Electrical Union. “The Electric Union is working to restore it.”

Previously, Cuban officials said power had been restored to small areas across the island, although no immediate figures were released on how many people had their service reconnected.

Some Cubans complained on social media that their power briefly returned before it expired.

The power outages threatened to plunge the communist-ruled country into a deeper crisis, as without electricity people would have no running water and refrigerated food would quickly spoil.

Millions of people have been without power in recent days as Cuba's aging power grid repeatedly collapsed.

Saturday's blackout followed an island-wide shutdown of Cuba's power grid on Friday after one of the island's largest power plants failed, according to the Energy Department.

Cuban officials blame a combination of events, from increased U.S. economic sanctions to disruptions from recent hurricanes and the poor state of the island's infrastructure.

In a televised address on Thursday that was delayed due to technical difficulties, Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz said much of the country's limited production had been halted to prevent people from being left completely without power.

“We have paralyzed economic activity to provide electricity to the population,” he said.

The country's Health Minister, José Angel Portal Miranda, said on X that the country's health facilities were running on generators and that health workers continued to provide vital services.

In Havana on Friday, drivers tried to navigate a city where no street lights appeared to be working and only a handful of police officers were directing traffic. Generators are a luxury for most Cubans and few were heard of in the city.

Classes in schools were canceled from Friday through the weekend, nightclubs and leisure centers were closed, and only “essential workers” were expected to report to their workplaces, according to a list of energy-saving measures published by the state website Cubadebate earlier on Friday.

CNN's Mia Alberti and CNN en Español's Verónica Calderón and Gerardo Lemos contributed to this report.