San Francisco outages leave 130,000 homes and businesses without power

Local media reported mass closures of restaurants and shops, and darkened street lights

Power has been restored for about 95,000 customers in San Francisco after a sizable part of the city was hit by an outage on Saturday.

The blackout knocked out power to 130,000 homes and businesses in the California city of around 800,000 people, according to the city's main utility firm, Pacific Gas and Electric Company.

The power failure left a large swath of the northern part of the city in the dark, beginning with the Richmond and Presidio neighborhoods and areas around Golden Gate Park in the early afternoon and growing in size.

PG&E did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the cause of the blackouts, which impacted roughly one-third of the utility company's customers in the city.

Local media reported mass closures of restaurants and shops and darkened street lights, and Christmas decorations.

The San Francisco Department of Emergency Management said on X that there were “significant transit disruptions” happening citywide and urged residents to avoid nonessential travel and treat down traffic signals as four-way stops.

PG&E did not immediately respond to requests for comment (AP)

"A large power outage is impacting San Francisco - only call 9-1-1 for life safety emergencies, avoid non-essential travel, treat down traffic signals as four-way stops, keep refrigerator and freezer doors closed, and turn off major appliances to prevent surges," it said.

The city's transportation agencies said they were bypassing some Muni bus and BART train stations because of the power outages.

At least some of the blackouts were caused by a fire that broke out inside a PG&E substation at 8th and Mission streets, fire officials posted on X about 3.15pm.

At 4pm, PG&E posted on X that it had stabilized the power grid and was not expecting additional customer outages.

By 11pm, PG&E said crews had restored about 95,000 customers, with about 35,000 remaining without electric service, adding that there were no injuries to workers or members of the public.