A Sydney power outage has hit morning commuters ahead of another scorcher.
More than 1,000 AusGrid customers have lost power in Barangaroo, Wynyard and Martin Place.
The outage has also knocked out traffic lights in Barangaroo and Wynyard and brought traffic to a grinding halt at the York and Market streets intersection.
Crews are on site working to restore the power, with AusGrid expecting services to be back on by 8.30am – however there are reports it will not be fixed until 10am.
Frustrated office employees were spotted working from cafes while they waited for power to be restored to their buildings.
NSW Energy Minister Penny Sharpe told 2GB radio host Ben Fordham on Thursday a power substation in the CBD ‘flooded’, which caused the blackout.
‘The outage that is in the city, my advice is that there is a substation that’s actually flooded and that’s what’s causing that outage,’ Ms Sharpe said.
The blackout has also disrupted the peak hour commute for Sydneysiders catching the train into work.
AusGrid has confirmed more than 950 customers have lost power in Barangaroo, Wynyard and Martin Place
The outage has also knocked out traffic lights in Barangaroo and Wynyard (pictured)
Frustrated office employees were spotted working from cafes while they waited for power to be restored to their buildings
‘My train is crawling over the Harbour Bridge. Now stopped in the middle of it,’ one commuter told Daily Mail Australia.
It comes as Sydney braces for another sweltering day of heat, with temperatures set to 34C in the city’s west and 31C along the coast on Thursday.
The Bureau of Meteorology has predicted the chance of severe thunderstorms, bringing heavy rain, damaging winds and hail later on Thursday.
Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Jonathan How said warm ocean waters around Australia were driving the unsettled conditions, with sea temperatures reaching 32C off Western Australia’s north coast.
‘As sea surface temperatures rise, the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere, or moisture increases and this is fuel for thunderstorms,’ Mr How said.
‘By Wednesday, we could see accumulated rainfalls exceed 50mm across parts of Victoria and the Northern Territory.
‘From Thursday and Friday, that’s when we start to see rainfall totals building in NSW and southern Queensland.’
A total of 347 sites suffered blackouts during an unplanned outage in Sydney’s CBD at 3pm on Tuesday.
