City Power says that electricity in Lenasia South and other areas is only expected to be restored at midnight.

Lenasia South, Daxina Hospital and Joburg Reservoir have been plunged in into darkness since 9pm last night.

City Power says the outage was caused by stolen cables during load shedding on Friday night.

Spokesperson Isaac Mangena says teams are on site working on repairs.

“We had our cables stolen during load shedding. The cables were stolen both on Eskom and City Power’s side. Also extensive damage happened when critical infrastructure at the substation blew up on restoration of supply by Eskom around midnight. We’ve got our teams on site working on repairs and we anticipate that the repairs will be completed around midnight on Saturday should everything go according to plan.”

At the same time Eskom has upgraded load shedding to stage 3 to accommodate the shortage of capacity, less then 24 hours after the power utility warned customers that only stage 2 will be enforced over the weekend.