Taiwan was hit by widespread power cuts this Thursday. In addition, its two largest cities, TMSC's iPhone processor production center, and over 5 million homes were affected by the problem.
Taiwan's capital Taipei and the country's second largest city, Kaohsiung, were affected by the power cuts, according to a Nikkei Asia report.
Taiwan Power Co said in a brief statement that its southern power grid system suffered a malfunction, leading to a blackout in southern Taiwan. Power outages also caused power outages in parts of northern and central Taiwan.
According to the company, the fault occurred at the Sinta Power Plant in Kaohsiung, the largest power plant in southern Taiwan. The iPhone processor production hub is in Tainan in southern Taiwan.
Economic Minister Wang Mei-hua said it would take longer to restore power to southern Taiwan because "it also takes some time to restart power plants." While power appears to have been restored to most of the affected homes by now, it is not clear how the outage affected TSMC's plant.
Tainan Science Park - the site of TSMC's most state-of-the-art chip production plants for iPhone processors - reported sudden and unusual voltage changes to the site's power supply, but said it is still determining whether those changes will affect the park. has had any effect. (...) TSMC said Thursday morning that it is still investigating whether the power outage across the island has affected its operations
We'll update the story once we learn more about the effects of this power outage on the main TSMC plant responsible for producing iPhone processors.