Sydneysiders have been warned more major power cuts could grip the city, after the third big outage in a month hit the CBD.
About 30,000 businesses and homes in northern parts of the city were without power for up to 45 minutes on Tuesday morning, after workers digging near a substation activated a safety shutdown.
Hundreds of office workers were evacuated, while others were stuck in lifts and 31 sets of traffic lights were blacked out.
At Circular Quay, the outage plunged the catwalk of Australian Fashion Week into darkness.
EnergyAustralia is investigating problems with a shutdown system that activates when a fault is detected on the four major cables running from Lane Cove to the CBD.
"For some reason our protection equipment is shutting down a wider area," EnergyAustralia spokeswoman Kylie Yates said.
"It's shutting down all four cables to the CBD and that's a matter we're now investigating and working on."
The shutdown was caused by workers not connected with EnergyAustralia digging near the North Sydney substation - the same cause as the city's previous blackouts, EnergyAustralia spokesman George Maltavarow said.
He admitted the CBD was vulnerable to more outages.
But, he said, EnergyAustralia had equipment on order from the United States to better protect Sydney's power supply.
"The equipment is state of the art and will be set up in the next couple of months," Mr Maltavarow said.
"I'm asking our customers to bear with us."
A blackout hit 70,000 homes and businesses in Sydney on March 31, crippling the city during afternoon peak hour, and 50,000 customers in the same area were again without power for about 90 minutes on April 4.
After apologising on previous occasions, Premier Nathan Rees was quick to dismiss Tuesday's blackout as someone else's fault.
"So as frustrating and as annoying as it is for everyone that was affected ... it was a straightforward case of a backhoe or similar interfering with the cable," Mr Rees told reporters.
However, NSW Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell said the government needed to accept some of the blame.
"Labor is presiding over a third-world power supply for what's meant to be a world-class city," he said.
He blamed the government's lack of investment in electricity infrastructure for the supply failures.
"Nathan Rees promised it wouldn't happen again," Mr O'Farrell said.
"It's continuing to happen. It's an embarrassment, particularly when ... Fashion Week is in Sydney.
"Nathan Rees' proof is in the pudding - if you don't invest in electricity this is what you get."
Tuesday's blackout struck at 10.30am (AEST).
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