About 25,000 customers, including homes, businesses, shopping malls and schools, lost power for a time this afternoon after a widespread outage in the Ottawa area.

Hydro Ottawa said the outage at around 4 p.m. was caused by a loss of supply from Hydro One's provincial grid.

Most residents had their power return within moments, while others had it return after about 10 minutes. Many traffic lights remained out for longer or were left flashing. Hydro workers were responding to fix those lights.

Some people were also stuck in elevators across Ottawa due to the power outage, which was reported as far west as Carleton Place.

One resident there tweeted she was shopping at Canadian Tire when the power went out.

There were also pockets across the city that were not affected by the outage.