A power outage that turned off the lights across southern Yukon Thursday morning is being blamed on an errant rodent that crept into some hydroelectricity equipment at a Whitehorse sub-station.

Officials with Yukon Electrical say the outage took place around 9 a.m. PT, with power being restored within about an hour. The problem was pinpointed to a substation along Mountainview Drive in the capital city.

"We had a squirrel crawl in between the insulators on a piece of equipment that caused a bit of a fireball, an arc, and caused the system to collapse right there at that sub [station]," spokesman Craig Steinbach told CBC News.

Steinbach said the fault knocked out power all along the Whitehorse-Aishihik-Faro hydro grid, which he admitted should not have happened, as the system was not supposed to be entirely shut down.

"The distribution system's designed so that these kind of faults, which are common — whether it be birds or trees or lightning and things of that nature — they're generally designed to sever off that piece of line that's faulted," he said, adding that the company will be looking into what happened.

Coincidentally, a squirrel's foray into a B.C. Hydro substation in Dawson Creek on Wednesday morning also caused a power outage there.