It was a dark wake-up for thousands of residents of southeastern Manitoba. Approximately 5,400 Manitoba Hydro customers are still without power, thanks to a widespread outage.

Bruce Owen with Manitoba Hydro says the initial outage happened around 3:40 am. He notes it was traced to a downed sub-transmission line near Ste. Anne. That line feeds to a number of sub-stations in the area.

Owen says after switching to a different circuit, they were able to temporarily restore power to customers in the Richer area at around 5:45 am. However, that did not hold. He notes their focus now is to get the sub-transmission line back up and running and get power restored to everybody as quickly as possible.

According to Owen, the outage is impacting a large area including Steinbach, Ste. Anne, Richer, Mitchell, Blumenort and Lorette.

There is no word on what caused the downed line. Owen says he also does not have an estimated time for when power will be restored.

"We won't be able to get everybody back on instantly all at once, we have to do it gradually," he explains. "Switching everybody back on might cause a secondary outage and cause more grief than it's worth."