San Francisco Power Outage Hits 90,000, Business District Affected

A sign on a restaurant informs customers that the facility is closed due to a power cut, in the financial district of San Francisco, Calif., on April 21, 2017. (REUTERS/Alexandria Sage)

SAN FRANCISCO—A power outage on Friday morning in San Francisco affected around 90,000 people, stalling work in the technology and finance center as a vast swath of the financial district lost electricity.

Paul Doherty, spokesman for utility PG&E, said there had been an incident at a San Francisco substation and a series of outages began affecting the city shortly after 9 a.m. He was unable to give an estimate of when the problem would be fixed.

The outage affected central and northern parts of the city, according to the city’s Department of Emergency Management.

Office workers spilled onto city streets in the heart of the business district, milling about as traffic snarled, since stoplights were not working.

An employee stands outside the closed doors of Macy's department store, during a power cut in San Francisco, Calif., April 21, 2017.
(REUTERS/Alexandria Sage)

King Lip, chief investment officer at Baker Avenue Asset Management in San Francisco said his offices had been hit.

“It’s pretty big, seems like half the city has no power. It’s a big deal. All our systems went down. We were in the middle of a trade, luckily we have cloud based software so all the trades are saved and we’re going to have our people in Texas or New York execute it,” he said.