Thousands without power in northwest London amid widespread outage

Thousands of people were left without power Sunday afternoon, following a hydro outage affecting pockets of the city's northwest, London Hydro says.

Officials say they're working to restore power in the Medway, Masonville, Stoney Creek and west London neighbourhoods. They anticipate customers will have their power back by 5 p.m.

The hydro company believes the outage had multiple causes, including this weekend's heat wave causing equipment to malfunction and supply issues with Hydro One, which provides power to London.

"The majority of the outage today was due to a Hydro One supply problem. We continue to work with them to restore power to the London community as quickly and safely as possible," London Hydro officials said in social media update.

"Hydro One delivers power to London Hydro. An issue exists at one of those delivery points into London, which is why Hydro One isn't showing an outage. Hydro One has crews on site."

Several businesses in the area were also scrambling, including a Costco in northwest London which used its backup generators for lighting.

Earlier in the afternoon approximately 6,000 customers were impacted by the outage in the Masonville, White Hills, and Orchard Park areas. Power has slowly returned to parts of those areas.

On Friday, Environment Canada issued a heat warning for the London area as temperatures feel closer to the low 40s with humidity. The Middlesex-London Health Unit issued an extended heat alert Friday, the fifth one this summer — surpassing the four issued last year.

London Hydro encourages residents to check its power outage map for the latest updates.