by Lynn Cox and Emma Grove

A blackout hit Sheerness on Friday lunchtime, following a larger power failure in the Cliffe area on Thursday night.

Around 400 Shops, businesses and residents in the high street area of the Sheppey town were affected by the power-cut, which EDF said was because of a fault on the electricity distribution network.

The power went out at about 1pm and was restored at about 1.50pm.

Earlier, more than 2,000 homes that were left without electricity at Cliffe had their supplies restored.

The power outage happened shortly after midnight and effected about 2,200 homes.

EDF Energy said that just before 9am on Friday engineers had managed to restore more than 1,300 supplies.

By about 10.10am the further 875 other homes and businesses also had their power restored.

Some people went without electricity for around 10 hours as the company was unable to get power restored quickly as engineers were having difficulty getting to substations because of the snow.

A spokesman said: “We appreciate how difficult it can be to lose power, especially in cold weather, and would like to apologise to customers for the inconvenience caused.

“The snow that has fallen in the region made travel conditions difficult for our engineers, it was harder for them to reach our substations and other parts of our network, which slowed down the restoration of supplies.

“We had additional call takers working from a number of centres but were are not indicate when power supplies would be restored and are concentrated on taking urgent safety calls.”