Whitehorse residents were waiting close to two hours Friday evening to do everything from heating up dinner to buying beer for the weekend when the power went out at around 5:16 p.m.

Drivers were also forced to navigate their way home from work through intersections where street lights had gone dark as Yukon Energy worked to restore power to the city and other communities affected.

'In a nut shell, a new installation when energized caused a disturbance,' Yukon Energy's Guy Morgan said today.

Staff of the Crown corporation are still investigating why the failure occurred after the new equipment had been tested prior to Friday's installation.

A total of 13,000 customers in Whitehorse, Teslin, Carcross, Tagish, as well as north on the Mayo Road and west to the Takhini River crossing were impacted by the major outage.

Also in Teslin, Carmacks, Ross River and Haines Junction, there was a two- to three-minute outage before back-up diesel generators in the communities fired up.

The outage came as a surprise to Yukon Energy staff, who had been working with the new equipment all week before installing it on Friday.

Yukon Energy will install the piece again, but expects to take extra precautions this time.

Morgan noted the system will be set up so that if there is a disturbance when it's installed, there will be a back-up system set up.