Power was nearly fully restored in Ecuador on Wednesday afternoon, after a nationwide electricity outage struck residential users and hospitals, as well as Quito's subway system, a failure officials blamed on faulty transmission lines.

Public Works Minister Roberto Luque said in a post on X that 95 percent of service had been restored by late Wednesday afternoon.

The outage left the nation of some 18 million in the dark, as the minister also singled out insufficient maintenance as a contributing factor.

"What happened today is just more proof of the energy crisis we're dealing with," he said, ticking off recent problems caused by insufficient power generation that has led to unscheduled service cuts.