More than 15,000 homes in the Saint John area were without power Saturday morning.

NB Power officials said a transmission failure was to blame, but it's unclear what caused the problem.

The power went out at about 4 a.m., affecting homes in Saint John, Rothesay and Quispamsis.

As of noon, there were still about 3,500 outages, but crews managed to restored power to all homes by late afternoon.

On Oct. 31, more than 13,000 homes across New Brunswick lost power. High winds were to blame, NB Power officials said.

The previous weekend, about 6,000 homes in the province lost electricity for several hours due to heavy rains that also caused flooding. In the Rothesay area, more than 2,000 customers were without power for about three hours. Heavy tree branches knocked around by wind came in contact with the power lines and caused the outages, officials said.