Power has finally been restored to Bedfordview, east of Johannesburg, including the vast Eastgate shopping mall after a three-day outage, SABC news reported on Thursday morning.

Power has finally been restored to Bedfordview, east of Johannesburg, including the vast Eastgate shopping mall after a three-day outage, SABC news reported on Thursday morning.

Residents in the area and the Eskom control rooms said that the electricity had come back on late on Wednesday night.

The town has been without power since 3am on Monday when an underground cable failed.

Eskom has blamed the outage on the installation of closed-circuit television cameras along the nearby R24 highway.

Technicians mounting the cameras had drilled too deeply into the ground and damaged the Eskom cable buried one-and-a-half metres down, under a concrete slab, Eskom spokesman Fani Zulu said.

As a result the cable started losing oil. The line tripped when the oil pressure got too low.

Businesses, especially those at the Eastgate shopping centre, said that they had lost millions of rands due to the power outage.

A spokesman for Liberty Life Properties, which owns the shopping centre, said on Wednesday that businesses had been unable to trade for three days.

"This has had a tremendous effect on tenants who mainly, with the exception of our anchor tenants, have been unable to trade at all," he commented, adding that shoppers had also been inconvenienced.

Angry residents have also complained bitterly about the inconvenience caused by the power outage. - Sapa