Venezuelans spent most of Friday in the dark as a major outage knocked out power in the capital, Caracas, and several states.

President Nicolás Maduro’s government blamed the outage, which it said began about 4:50 a.m., on “electrical sabotage.”

“Nobody will take away our peace and tranquility of the Venezuelan people,” Freddy Nanez, the communications minister, wrote in a message shared with journalists on Telegram.Nanez said in a voice message on Telegram that all 24 of Venezuela’s states had been at least partially impacted. He characterized the outage as a “desperate” attempt by Maduro’s opponents to violently oust the president. “The entire national government has been activated to overcome this new aggression,” he said.