Blackout hits major sections of Manhattan

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A major power outage early Saturday evening struck the heart of New York City, including parts of midtown Manhattan and the Upper West Side, where 42,000 customers were affected, according to utility Con Edison.

The city's transit authority tweeted that multiple stations were not operational and were being bypassed.

The outage comes on the anniversary of the citywide blackout of 1977, which led to rioting and looting. That outage started on July 13 and ended the next day.

A senior city official with direct knowledge of the matter says it appears the outage was caused by a transformer fire. New York's fire department, FDNY, tweeted it was at the scene of a transformer fire on West 64th Street.

Mayor Bill de Blasio subsequently said in Twitter that the source of the outage involved a "manhole fire."

FDNY has units handling calls throughout the impacted area to assist people stuck in elevators, the department stated on Twitter.

At NBC News' headquarters, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the outage darkened hallways and caused Nightly News to broadcast using backup generators.

Users of social media shared images of Times Square's iconic billboards going lifeless, intersections without traffic lights and movie theaters emptying out.

By midnight, just under five hours after thousands lost power, electricity was fully restored throughout the city.

During a press conference with the city’s Office of Emergency Management and officials from Con Edison, authorities said 73,000 customers had lost power due to the outage. Loud cheers rang out as power was restored to another of the darkened sections – bringing five of the six back online at that point.

OEM officials said the root cause of the blackout is not yet known, but it was not due to extensive power use on the hot summer day. Authorities do not expect any more outages throughout the night.

Police and fire department sources tell CBS2 that the cause of the failure appears to be a feeder cable problem below ground at 64th Street and West End Ave. A transformer fire at that location may be to blame for the massive outage.

According to the news, the term "customer" can refer to an entire building. Therefore the 42,000 customers affected by this blackout can translate to hundreds of thousands of actual people.

... Without power, New Yorkers will now be able to learn how to function under the Green New Deal...