Venezuela suffers another blackout within a month

Venezuela has been hit by yet another electricity blackout, including much of the capital, Caracas, sowing alarm two weeks after a nationwide outage that paralyzed the country.

The power cut in the capital occurred around 1.20pm local time (17:20 GMT) on Monday, affecting the electricity supply to the city centre.

After nightfall, many apartment buildings in the Caracas metro area - home to around six million people - were aglow again and traffic lights were back on, but people in many other states reported they were still in the dark.

President Nicolas Maduro's government blamed the outage on an "attack" targeting the Guri hydroelectric plant. Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez said the latest blackout was a result of "an attack on the charging and transmission centre" at the Guri dam, which supplies 80 per cent of the power to the country of 30 million.

Power went out in much of Caracas and nearly a dozen states in the early afternoon, stirring memories of a week-long outage earlier in the month that was the most severe in the country's history.

Service was restored in many areas within hours on Monday and Rodriguez said in a televised broadcast that power was being "progressively reestablished."

"We have suffered a new attack on our national electricity system's load and transmission centre today," Rodriguez said, adding that the event had "similar characteristics" to the March 7 "attack."

"What (last time) took days, now has been taken care of in just a few hours," Rodriguez said, saying the fix had been made in "record time".

Rodriguez told that the opposition was responsible, claiming it "wants to plunge the population into profound unease".

The blackouts come as the country is experiencing a deep political crisis after National Assembly President Juan Guaido invoked the constitution to assume the interim presidency in January, arguing that Maduro's May 2018 re-election was illegitimate.

Guaido has been recognized as Venezuela's rightful leader by most Western countries, including the United States. Maduro, a socialist who took office in 2013 and who has the support of Russia and China, says Guaido is a US puppet attempting to lead a coup against him.