POWER has been restored to homes and businesses in Oxford's Cowley Road after problems with a cable plunged the street into darkness overnight. 

Some 54 SSE customers have been affected by the outage, which was caused by an underground cable fault. 

Oxford Mail:

The company said all but one of the properties affected had been re-connected by 6.33am this morning, with the final customer expected to have power again by noon. 

Power went down at 10.56am yesterday and engineers were forced to dig up the road to repair the problem.

As darkness fell, a large section of the road near the o2 Academy and Tesco store was without power and having to rely on back-up generators while the street lights had also failed. 

Oxford Mail:

Traffic lights in the area were also not working and several businesses including the Bullingdon and Cowley Retreat were shut, although it is not clear if this was in connection with the problems. 

A spokeswoman for SSE said its staff were on the site this morning to re-assure residents and offer advice on how to claim compensation. 

Cowley Road has been dogged with power problems over the past year with business owners complaining in the past about how the issues have affected trade. 

The spokeswoman apologised to customers for the inconvenience caused and thanked them for their patience as the company worked to fix the problem.