TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC) said on Wednesday power had been restored at a major manufacturing site in southern Taiwan after an outage earlier in the day. The operations of TSMC, whose clients include Apple Inc and Qualcomm Inc, are being closely watched by its customers and investors due to a global shortage of chips for everything from cars to washing machines. Alice Cheng, deputy head of the Tainan science park where the plant is based, said an underground power line was accidentally severed during construction work in the late morning but that most supply to all the factories there had resumed as of 7 p.m. (1100 GMT). She added some of TSMC’s machines were able to run on electricity generated by back up systems during the outage. TSMC, the world’s largest contract chip maker, said its facility experienced a power outage due to “an abnormality with a power line to the South Taiwan Science Park extra high voltage substation”. “Personnel in the fab were not evacuated. Power was restored the same day. TSMC is currently evaluating the impact,” it said in a statement to Reuters. TSMC reports its first quarter earnings on Thursday.