Tens of thousands of Nova Scotia Power customers were without electricity Saturday after an unexpected problem with a transmission line linking Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, knocked out power to homes and business.

The issue happened around 11 a.m. until early afternoon for most.

The utility says at this point in the investigation, it looks like it was due to a build up of ice on the transmission line, from a storm earlier in the week.

The outages were in various areas across the province including Cape Breton and Halifax.

At one point, nearly 50,000 were impacted.