The outage hit 3,660 apartment buildings, about 16,500 private homes and 224 socially significant facilities, the regional branch of the Emergency Situations Ministry said. The Insider calculated that the failure affected at least 36 percent of Primorye's population; the region was home to roughly 1.8 million people at the start of 2025, according to Rosstat data.
The failure occurred at the 110 kV Shtykovo substation, The Insider reported. The Far Eastern Distribution Grid Company reported damage to equipment and to water supply facilities, and has not yet named a cause. Four pumping stations of Primorye Vodokanal — Novaya, Tsentralnaya, Zarechnaya and Podgorodenka — shut down after the outage. Some power consumers were connected via backup circuits, repairs at the substation are continuing, and 18 specialists are involved in the work.
Several districts of Vladivostok lost water, along with hospitals and clinics in Vladivostok, Artyom and the Nadezhdinsky district. The regional Health Ministry says water is being delivered to the facilities and that inpatient units and clinics are continuing to operate.
In Vladivostok, schools were advised to shorten lessons or move the second shift to remote learning, and kindergartens were asked to tell parents to pick up their children early. Primvodokanal expects to restore cold water supply at about 18:00 local time, though even after the system resumes operation it will take time to fill the lines. In Vladivostok alone, at least two thousand buildings remain without water.
Initial figures on the scale of the failure were considerably lower. The Primorye prosecutor's office said in the morning that more than 140,000 residents were without cold water in Vladivostok and Artyom. The Emergency Situations Ministry later updated the data to include the Nadezhdinsky district, putting the number of people left without water at more than 650,000.
The region has seen similar utility failures before. In January 2024 in Vladivostok, damage to a heating network left more than three thousand residents of 18 apartment buildings without heat. In January 2026, at least 1,280 reports of system failures were recorded across Russia, nearly twice as many as a year earlier.