Norwich ― About 1,400 Norwich Public Utilities customers were without power for several hours Tuesday afternoon after a malfunction occurred in underground equipment in the downtown area, NPU officials said.

The outage began at 3:28 p.m. in equipment on South Thames Street on the west side of Norwich Harbor and affected 1,320 customers.

NPU spokesman Chris Riley said the location of the malfunction in the equipment at an NPU transformer made it difficult to pinpoint the problem and make repairs.

“Assessing and working on this issue is more challenging, as it will be in a manhole,” NPU posted on its Facebook page.

NPU estimated crews would start restoring power at about 8 p.m.