A massive blackout hit southern California late Thursday leaving millions of people without power, officials said. "All 1.4 million of our customers are currently without power," said San Diego Gas and Electric in a twitter posting around 5:30 pm (0030 Friday GMT), adding that the outage appeared to have originated in transmission lines in Arizona.
The California Independent System Operator said the outage extended to parts of Arizona and the Mexican state of Baja California. Officials warned residents that they should expect to be without power until Friday. Coinciding with heightened terror fears agead of the tenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001 the outage prompted fears that the region's electricity supply had been targeted by saboteurs. But San Diego officials in a press conference that the cause was not a terror attack and that the transmission line appeared to have been tripped by overheating during the recent heatwave.