Taiwan blackout hurts high-tech

Brownouts continued to plague parts of Taiwan Friday following its worst blackout in history.

Taiwan Power Co. (Taipower), the state-run utility, rationed electricity as it worked to fully restore labored to bring the island's electricity grid back after the three-hour blackout late Thursday.

There has been no comprehensive official estimate of financial damage since a morning report that firms in the Hsinchu Science Park, heart of Taiwan's key electronics industry, suffered losses of $62 million.

However, Taiwan's two top makers of computer chips told Reuters they suffered only minimal disruptions and that their output was unaffected.

Taipower said the outage may have been caused by the collapse of a high-pressure electricity tower in southern Taiwan, due to a landslide. The collapse reportedly triggered a chain reaction through the power grid.

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