An island-wide power outage in Taiwan briefly impacted the world's largest contract chip manufacturer, during a global semiconductor crisis.

TSMC was caught up in the widespread power outage caused by a failure at the Hsinta coal- and gas-fired power plant in Kaohsiung. Around 6.2 million households were also affected.

The outage follows a local power cut at TSMC's Fab 14 P7 facility last month due to construction work.

"Certain TSMC's facilities experienced a brief power dip in the afternoon of May 13 due to an outage at the Hsinta Thermal Power Plant," the company said in a statement.

"Electricity is currently being supplied as normal. TSMC has taken emergency response measures and prepared generators to minimize potential impact."

The other major chipmakers in Tainan said that they were unaffected.

Taiwanese officials said that the power outage took longer to recover from than usual due to water shortages.

The worst drought in 57 years has also impacted chip manufacturers, with many having to truck in water to keep systems going.

Over in Japan, Renesas Electronics is still recovering from a devastating fire at one of its semiconductor plants, while Samsung, NXP, and Infineon are still catching up from a lengthy outage in Texas due to Storm Uri.

Chipmakers have warned that - even without these acute disruptions - semiconductor supplies are expected to be constrained for years.