Thousands of power customers were in the dark after a widespread outage knocked out electricity service Tuesday afternoon.

The power outage in the downtown and Oliver area started just before 2 p.m.

An EPCOR spokesperson said more than 4,000 customers were affected by two outages – just after 2:30 p.m. the EPCOR website showed the outage area had shrunk in size and the number of affected customers dropped to 176.

The spokesperson said the majority of customers had power back by 2:26 p.m., and the cause was a “damaged switching cubicle.”

At last word, crews were on scene restoring power, and investigating the cause. The EPCOR website said the outage was expected to be resolved by 4 p.m.

More to come…