Thousands left without electricity after snow brings widespread powercuts

Thousands of households have been left without power today (Picture: Getty)

At least 40,000 people across Britain have been left without power as snow continues to fall.

Areas in the South East and east of England have been cut off as a result of the outages, with many forced to stay at home.

West Sussex has been worst affected with electricity to households, businesses, schools and mobile phone networks going down at about 10am.

Landlines in parts of Sussex were also out of order, while nearly 36,000 people were left dealing with the chaos.

A large power outage has affected the south of England forcing many supermarkets to shut doors (Picture: Getty)

A sign saying ‘Closed No Power’ is displayed at the Sage Garden Centre in Hassocks, West Sussex (Picture: Getty)

Mims Davies, Tory MP for Mid Sussex, warned that areas including Burgess Hill, Haywards Heath and the surrounding villages had been impacted.

‘UK Power Networks became aware of a fault at around 8.30am following a fault with an overhead cable in the Horsham area,’ she tweeted.

‘An emergency isolation of some areas has been needed for safe repairs to be undertaken.

‘This is a significant outage covering a lot of West Sussex and East Sussex – I am told it is a complex repair.’

Power cuts also affected parts of Kent, Suffolk, Buckinghamshire and Bedford, the Mirror reported.

In London, Enfield, Tottenham, Borehamwood and Hornsey are among the areas without power.

This happened on one of the coldest nights during this time of the year in more than a decade.

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Up to 30cm of snow is also predicted to pile on in parts of the country as blizzard conditions continue.

Some homes have already had their power restored, but others are expected to suffer until as late as 7pm tonight.

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