Here's why more than 5,000 Northampton homes were plunged into darkness by power cut
Electricity supplies restored by 9pm but engineers still working on permanent solution
Power supply chiefs have apologies after thousands Northampton homes were plunged into darkness on Wednesday night (March 23).
Western Power Distribution, which maintains electricity the supply network across Northamptonshire, confirmed more than 5,000 properties in the Duston and Harlestone area were affected by the outage at around 7.45pm.
More than 4,800 had electricity supplies restored within an hour while a further 269 were back on grid by 9pm.
A spokesman for the company said: "The incident was caused by an underground cable fault.
"Supplies were restored by a process called ‘switching’ where power is re-routed around the fault.
"WPD engineers will now locate the fault and carry out a permanent repair."