Cuba’s electrical grid shut down again early Saturday, leaving the island without electricity after authorities tried but failed to restore power following an earlier nationwide blackout on Friday.

The island’s state company Electric Union reported a second “total outage” at 6:15 a.m., just hours after officials reported they had restored power in a few “microsystems” all over the island.

The entire country first lost electricity Friday morning after a major power plant failure, just hours after Prime Minister Manuel Marrero warned about an “energy emergency” and coming blackouts. In a television broadcast Thursday evening, he said that the government had “paralyzed” most of the economy to provide a minimum of electricity to the public.

The Electric Union did not initially say what caused the second total blackout, but officials had earlier said the process of restoring service should not be rushed.

Later on Saturday, Lázaro Guerra, a senior director at Electric Union, said there was a “failure” that affected part of an electrical “microsystem” in western Cuba that provides 650 megawatts to other places around the country.

As the day went on, Cuban official media reported there had been a “gradual restoration” of electrical service in limited areas in the provinces of Havana, Villa Clara, Holguín, Santiago de Cuba and Sancti Spíritus to serve hospitals, water pumps and other essential services. But the electricity is being provided by generators using diesel fuel, Guerra told official news outlet Cubadebate.

By Saturday afternoon, the country’s power stations were still not connected to the electrical grid, and most of the country was still without electricity.

Friday night, officials said they were trying to restart two thermoelectric power plants near Havana, located in Mariel and Santa Cruz del Norte. They said another one providing power to Santiago in eastern Cuba was beginning operations. Guerra said repairs were close to being finished at the Antonio Guiteras power station in the western city of Matanzas that initially caused the grid to collapse Friday.

Many of Cuba’s power plants are outdated and inefficient; some have been in operation for over 50 years without proper maintenance. After the country’s grid collapsed when Hurricane Ian hit in 2022, experts warned the government needed to urgently invest in modernizing the system.

The prime minister said Thursday that the lack of oil has worsened the situation in recent days, causing electricity cuts for up to 20 hours daily in some places.

Cuba is receiving less oil from Venezuela and Russia, its political allies. The country has been going through its worst economic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the government lacks money to buy oil in the international market to meet domestic demand. But hardliners in the government have resisted market reforms and foreign investment.

One of the old-guard comandantes, Ramiro Valdés, 92, appeared next to the country’s leader, Miguel Díaz-Canel, in the Electric Union’s headquarters in photos shared by the company on social media.

Díaz-Canel said the outages, resulting from the power stations’ lack of maintenance and foreign currency to buy oil, were the direct result of the decades-old U.S. embargo — the government’s go-to reason for whatever ails the economy.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson pushed back against those claims, saying that “obviously” the U.S. “is not to blame for today’s blackout on the island or the overall energy situation in Cuba.”

“As we have seen over the past few years, Cuba’s economic conditions, stemming from long-term mismanagement of its economic policy and resources, have increased hardships on the Cuban people,” the official said. He added that the Biden administration is concerned about the potential humanitarian impacts of the outage on the Cuban people. It also noted that Cuban authorities had not requested help from the United States.

Cubans irked by the daily blackouts defied the country’s Draconian laws punishing criticism of the government and left several comments in official news outlets calling for government officials to resign. The second outage will likely exacerbate public frustration as food begins to spoil because of the lack of refrigeration.

To compound the island’s problems, recently formed Tropical Storm Oscar is expected to hit eastern Cuba on Sunday with rains and winds up to 50 mph.

Friday night a few images of darkened streets and buildings emerged from Cuba, though social media postings were scant as cellphone batteries died out. CNN’s correspondent in Havana, Patrick Oppmann, reported that a handful of hospitals and hotels in Havana were running on generators on Friday evening, and talked about the “nerve-wracking” experience of driving around the city with no working traffic lights.

A video circulating on social media showed images of Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport in the dark, but Cuba’s transportation minister said Friday night that airports around the country have generators and were in service.

American Airlines said that flights to Cuba continue as scheduled. Cuba Travel, an agency based in Hialeah, said it continues to sell air flight tickets to the island.

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(El Nuevo Herald staffer Maykel Gonzalez contributed.)

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