Power was restored on Sunday for most of the 130,000 homes and businesses in San Francisco that were affected by a major outage a day earlier, according to a report by Associated Press (AP). 

The power outage had caused widespread disruption across the city, as of noon on Sunday, around 17,000 customers were still without electricity, according to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. 

PG&E said its teams were continuing work to restore power in several neighbourhoods and small parts of downtown San Francisco after Saturday’s outage.

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Full restoration expected by Monday afternoon

Electricity to be restored to all remaining customers by no later than 2 pm on Monday, PG&E said in an official statement shared on X (formerly Twitter). “We currently expect to restore all remaining customers impacted by the substation outage by no later than 2 p.m. on Monday. PG&E crews will continue to work until all customers have been restored,” the statement said.

The cause of the outage is still being investigated. PG&E said it has deployed additional engineers and electricians to speed up the restoration work. “This is a very complex work plan and will require the highest amount of safety focus to ensure safe work actions,” PG&E said.

No injuries have been reported. The outage began shortly after 1 pm on Saturday and initially affected a large part of northern San Francisco, with the affected area continuing to expand. At its peak, about one-third of PG&E’s customers in the city were without power. Around 4 pm on Saturday, PG&E said in a post on X that the grid had been stabilised and that no further outages were expected.

Businesses shut, streets and decorations went dark

Social media users and local news outlets reported widespread closures of restaurants and shops, along with dark street lights and Christmas decorations, on what is usually one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

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The San Francisco Department of Emergency Management said on X that there were “significant transit disruptions” across the city. It asked residents to avoid non-essential travel and to treat non-functioning traffic signals as four-way stops. Waymo, which operates driverless ride-hailing vehicles, also suspended its services.

At least one video shared on social media appeared to show a Waymo vehicle stopped in the middle of an intersection.