NEARLY a thousand homes were plunged into darkness on Wednesday morning.

Bournemouth residents in 51 postcodes in the Townsend area were out of electricity since around 1am on April 24.

According to SSEN, an engineer arrived on site early morning to fix the problem.

A spokesman for SSEN said: "We are very sorry for the power cut and we are aware of a fault on our main network affecting 966 homes.

"This is affecting a large area and it's likely several streets in your area are affected by the same outage.

"The cause of this power cut is a fault on our overhead network. This is the most common type of fault we see and our teams are very experienced in dealing with these issues.

"In most cases, our engineers are able to restore power by simply replacing a fuse at the local substation, however, if the fault is severe, this may result in us needing to make full repairs which can take longer."

It's understood Royal Bournemouth Hospital, which is nearby, was not affected.

The power cut was repaired by midday on Wednesday.