All across the five boroughs and even on Long Island and in New Jersey, residents may have noticed their lights flickered on and off at around 11:55 p.m.
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Con Ed officials say that the fault occurred at the Farragut Substation on John Street near the Brooklyn waterfront.
"Essentially people saw a flicker in their lights for about a second, a little bit before midnight, and then voltage recovered, or went back to normal," Con Edison President Matt Ketschke said.
The explosion was captured on surveillance video.
The NYPD says Con Ed employees were restoring a transmission line at the time of the electrical mishap. Officials say a piece of high-voltage electrical equipment failed and a voltage dip occurred.
Witnesses described an explosion and rising smoke coming out of the substation.
"All of a sudden you just hear, like, a huge explosion. Boom! And you're like, what the hell is going on," said Foster Rodriguez, an eyewitness who heard the explosion from across the street.
Manhattan chiropractor Anna Di heard it from across the East River.
"The lights flickered first, about twice. And then I heard a bang. And then I turned to see an orange glow," Di said.
A flicker of light, lasting about one-tenth of a second, flashed from the substation, but the equipment recovered quickly.
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The disruption set off fire alarms and left people trapped in elevators across the city.
MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber said 178 elevators and escalators in the MTA system were affected. Two people were stuck in elevators and rescued. Five elevators are still out, five others are "having intermittent challenges."
A security guard at the Wegmans grocery store in Brooklyn was stuck in an elevator for an hour before FDNY was able to get them to safety.
At Grand Central Terminal, all elevators and escalators were briefly out of service, but have since been restored, an LIRR statement said.
"Electrical equipment such as elevators and escalators are sensitive sometimes to momentary fluctuations of power. Sometimes the systems need to be reset. We've been in contact with the New York City Department of Emergency Management and they did have to conduct some elevator rescues," Ketschke said.
The outage halted subway service between Grand Central Terminal and Wall Street, New York City Transit officials said in a statement on X.
No major safety issues were reported.
Ketschke said the equipment involved in the outage is definitely damaged, but redundant transformers are keeping the lights on.
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Though inconvenient for scattered transit and elevator passengers, the episode rates as barely a flicker in the history of New York City outages.
Widespread vandalism followed a July 13, 1977 blackout that was confined to the city and its immediate surrounding area.
Twenty-six years later, New Yorkers were among the 50 million people across the Northeast who lost power on Aug. 14, 2003.
Much of the city was dark for days when Superstorm Sandy ravaged the East Coast on Oct. 29, 2012.
(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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