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San Francisco. There was darkness in America’s tech hub San Francisco on Saturday. The city witnessed a massive blackout as approximately 130,000 homes lost power. This also affected the business there. According to information shared by news agency Xinhua, about one-third of all customers of Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) were affected. The first outage was reported around 9:40 a.m. local time, knocking out power to about 15,000 residential and commercial customers, according to PG&E’s website.
The second outage started around 10:10 am. PG&E’s online outage map initially showed about 25,000 customers were affected. However, the company later updated the map, which showed that the scope of the outage is increasing.
The San Francisco Fire Department said a fire broke out inside a PG&E substation in the city Saturday afternoon, causing power cuts. In a post on the social platform X, PG&E said it was working with first responders and city officials on the outage that affected 130,000 customers in San Francisco. As of 5:30 p.m. (01:30 GMT Sunday), a PG&E spokesperson said the company was not able to provide an estimated time for power to be restored to any part of the city.
According to the information given by New York Times, due to disruption in electricity service, many mass transit stations also had to be closed. Apart from this, the service of vehicles running without drivers also had to be stopped. San Francisco Ballet’s Nutcracker show was also canceled. Officials say that the power supply service was affected only due to the fire, it will be investigated. The fire brigade has advised people to stay away from the area around 8th and Mission Street.
