UPDATE 10:45 p.m. — BGE released a statement saying that it had restored power to most who were affected by the outage.

We have restored service for nearly all of the Anne Arundel County customers who lost power earlier today, and we expect to restore service tonight for the small number of customers who remain without power.

BGE statement

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (DC News Now) — Tens of thousands of people in the Annapolis area were without power Thursday due to an outage there.

BGE’s outage map showed roughly 41,000 customers in the area of Maryland’s capital without electricity late Thursday afternoon.

The earliest reported of an outage seemed to be around 3:10 p.m.

City of Annapolis Office of Emergency Management (OEM) tweeted that there was an “extensive” citywide power outage and that it was working with BGE to identify all the impacts and to determine how long it would take to restore power. The tweet added that traffic lights were out. The office asked everyone to use extreme caution on the area’s roadways.

Naval Support Activity Annapolis noted in a tweet that it was experiencing “significant traffic issues” because of the traffic light outages. It closed Gate 1 as a result and said that traffic leaving Gate 8 was being directed to turn right onto Highway 450.

The city said in a news release that it appeared that a power disruption at the Cedar Park substation affected the Annapolis peninsula and surrounding communities.

Nick Alexopoulos, spokesman for BGE, said that it was an equipment failure that affected a large part of Anne Arundel County, knocking out service to more than 72,000 customers.