- 32 London postcodes were affected by the outage.
- Liverpool Street station’s departure boards went blank.
- Great Northern trains were unable to stop at Essex Road because of a loss of platform lighting.
A widespread London power cut disrupted thousands of homes and businesses on Monday morning after a fault on an underground electricity cable knocked out supplies across 32 postcodes.
The outage began at around 10.30am, with offices in the City of London, shops and homes among those affected. UK Power Networks (UKPN), which operates the electricity network across London, the South East and East of England, said the fault occurred on an underground cable.
Power was gradually restored across the affected areas. UKPN later confirmed that full service had been restored shortly after midday, after initially estimating that supplies would return between noon and 1pm.
The disruption was particularly visible in the City and east London, where offices were left without electricity and some businesses were forced to pause operations.
Liverpool Street station was also affected, with departure information screens going blank during the outage. Great Northern said platform lighting at Essex Road station was affected, meaning trains were temporarily unable to stop there. Passengers were advised to use Old Street or Highbury & Islington instead.
When the power went off across London
The affected postcodes stretched across parts of east, north, central and west London. They included areas covered by E1, E2, E5, E8, E9, EC2, EC3, IG3, N1, N5, NW8 and W2 postcode districts.
UKPN said it was able to reroute supplies to restore electricity to 4,989 homes and businesses relatively early in the response, while engineers worked to deal with the underlying fault.
The outage also affected some traffic signals and CCTV systems in the area. Transport services otherwise continued to operate, although buses were advised to take extra care where traffic signals were affected.
The incident is a reminder of how quickly a local failure in underground electricity infrastructure can affect a much wider part of the capital. For businesses in central London, even a relatively short outage can mean lost connectivity, disrupted payments, inactive computer systems and interruptions to normal operations.
UKPN says customers experiencing power cuts can check its online outage service or call 105 for updates. It also operates a Priority Services Register for customers who may need additional support during an outage.
