Electricity has been returned to one of Dublin's principal shopping areas after it was hit by a power fault this afternoon.

250 businesses in the capital's Grafton Street and South William Street areas lost their supply of electricity after an underground cable was damaged.

The fault happened at 12.45pm this lunchtime. The ESB reported that its teams were working to isolate the fault and the power was restored by 2pm.

During the outage Minister for Transport Leo Varadkar tweeted that he had gotten stuck in a lift "with half the Cabinet", but it remains to be seen if his unfortunate predicament was related to the power cut.