A problem at a Belco substation left thousands of customers in the western parishes without power for about three hours last night.

Work crews restored power to almost all affected residents by about 10pm after almost 11,000 homes were left in the dark.

Wayne Caines, the president of Belco, said: “On Sunday evening, a fault occurred at the Belmont substation that caused an outage in the west end of the island.

“Belco crews were immediately dispatched and identified an underground cable fault as the cause.”

He added: “Two localised areas in the West End remain affected, with crews on site working to restore those customers now.

“A full investigation will commence Monday morning. Belco thanks all affected customers for their patience during this outage.”

The blanket outage started at about 7pm and had a full impact on Sandys, Southampton and Warwick, while stretching as far east as Valley Road in Paget.

The problem was compounded by technical malfunctions as the Belco outage map went offline multiple times.