Thousands without power as massive outage blacks out much of downtown Toronto

A massive swathe of downtown Toronto is without power after an outage occurred late Wednesday morning.

Toronto Hydro reported just before 11:30 a.m. that it was responding to an outage in the downtown area, assuring the public that "crews are on site working as quickly and safely as possible to restore power to all affected customers."

An outage map shows just how widespread the service interruption is as of early afternoon.

Toronto Hydro

Roughly half an hour after that initial advisory, Toronto Hydro provided an update stating that crews were still working away to restore power in an area bounded by Rosedale Valley Rd. south to the Gardiner and Church St., and east to the DVP.

As of noon, Toronto Hydro expects power to be restored by around 1:30 p.m., though it warns that "this is subject to change."

The outage has been blamed on a transformer fire, and roughly 6,500 are currently without power.