2005 Moscow power blackouts

Some tens of thousands of people were trapped in stranded underground trains in the Moscow Metro and in elevators, railway signaling was put out of action and many commercial and governmental organisations were paralysed.

[1][2][3] The accident, which some accounts state affected more than 2 million people, started in powerstation no.

[citation needed] The immediate cause of the incident, some state, was a mixture of several factors, among which feature: equipment wear-and-tear, absence of back-up powers, the fact that Moscow had endured temperatures above 30 °C (86 °F) for a number of days.

It is the only region in which there has been no automatic shut-off system installed since the fall of the Soviet Union.

This increased vulnerability of Moscow's electrical network played an important role in what happened.