(San Francisco) Power has been restored to the majority of San Francisco homes affected Saturday evening by a large outage in this large city in the western United States, the main local electricity company announced Sunday morning.
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Power was restored by 7:30 a.m. local time (10:30 a.m. Eastern Time) to about 110,000 of the nearly 130,000 customers affected by the outage, Pacific Gas & Electric Company said in a statement published on X.
According to city authorities and the company, this large power outage was caused by a fire in an electrical substation.
The latter caused “significant and extensive” damage, the company said, warning that “repairs will be complex”.
A large part of this large Californian city, which has more than 800,000 inhabitants, was plunged into darkness on Saturday evening, disrupting public transport, before electricity began to be restored.
PHOTO CARLOS BARRIA, REUTERS
People walk through an intersection in the dark during a power outage that affected about 130,000 residents, according to the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, in San Francisco, California, December 21, 2025.
Parts of the city were covered in fog and many businesses were forced to close in the midst of the Christmas shopping period, the San Francisco Chronicle.
Police, firefighters and other municipal officials had been deployed, according to the municipality, which asked residents to stay at home if possible.
The outage had notably rendered many traffic lights as well as the Waymo autonomous transport service inoperable.
