A state of emergency was declared, with a curfew in affected areas, where soldiers have been deployed.

The Viña del Mar festival, the largest music event in Latin America, has had its third day cancelled.

Hospitals and prisons across the country are on emergency generators and transport is severely disrupted. The government blamed a system failure.

Addressing the nation on TV, President Gabriel Boric said eight million homes had been affected, but power had been restored to about half of them.

“What happened today is outrageous,” he said. “It’s intolerable that one or several companies should affect the everyday life of millions of Chileans, and that’s why it’s the state’s duty to hold them responsible.”

The national service for disaster prevention and response said earlier that the outage stretched from the regions of Arica and Parinacota in the north to Los Lagos in the south.

Reuters news agency reported that the world’s largest copper mine, Escondida, was without power, citing a source close to the matter.

Latam Airlines said some of its flights might also be disrupted while power supplies were down, and urged passengers to check their journey status.

In a post on X, the Santiago Metro operator said its service had been temporarily suspended because of the power outage, with stations being evacuated and closed.

Footage from the city showed passengers being evacuated from stations by walking up switched-off escalators, while traffic signals were also shown not working.

There were also long queues for buses which were still running on the city’s roads.

María Angélica Román, 45, told AFP news agency: “They let us leave work because of the power cut, but now I don’t know how we will get home, because all the buses are full.”

Chile’s Interior Minister, Carolina Tohá, also posted on X to say that a meeting would be called to discuss the continuing measures to restore services.