A South Anchorage power outage caused traffic to back up and temporarily shutdown the Dimond Center Wednesday.

The power went off at about 10:20 a.m. For more than two hours, traffic was stop-and-go at the intersection of Dimond and the Old Seward. Inside the Dimond Center, mall retailers and customers were both left in the dark. In all, nearly 6,000 customers with Chugach Electric lost power at some point

“It's good that it happened at 10 a.m. and if it'll be back up at noon. Really our peak traffic starts from noon on, so in terms of timing -- yes it's not great that it happened, but the timing was better than expected,” Hugh Ashlock, Dimond Center partner, said. “Our traffic peaks, our traffic builds from about noon, peaks at 3 until about 7. So, you know this place would be quadruple the amount of people, 10 times the amount of people that you see right now.”

Power was restored by 12:40 p.m. Officials with Chugach Electric say a malfunction at the Sandlake sub-station was to blame and the cause should be known by Thursday.