THE region’s tourism capital was hit by a massive power cut earlier today, November 18,

Power was lost at just after 9am to 26,943 properties across York, including city centre businesses, as well as traffic lights and the city’s railway station.

More than 21,000 properties had their electricity supplies restored within nine minutes but the remaining properties had to wait until 9.45 am to see their power restored.

A National Grid spokeswoman said the outage had been traced to a fault on an electricity transformer at the substation.

"We’ll now be investigating to find out exactly how and why the fault occurred," she added.