It didn't last long, but it certainly was inconvenient. The lights have come back on in the downtown core and businesses have gone back to normal, after a nearly two hour outage left many in the dark Wednesday morning.

Hydro disappeared from a large area bounded by Yonge St. to Spadina and Queen down to Lake Ontario around 11am. The outage had Toronto Hydro crews scrambling to figure out what happened and it appears Mother Nature was to blame. Officials say a squirrel may have gotten into one of the utility's conductors, leading to the large scale failure. A dead animal was discovered in the Wellington substation when crews arrived.

And it was a classic case of not knowing what you've got until you lose it. All across the affected areas, things ground to an instant halt. Some banks were forced to lock their doors, because tellers couldn't access computer accounts. ABMs were out, too. Waiters in restaurants stood outside looking at the street, unable to serve would-be customers at the busy noon hour because their appliances weren't working.

And the roads were immediately impacted with traffic lights out, causing the busy and bustling intersections to slow to a crawl as each car, bus, streetcar and truck took turns going through de facto four-way stops.

Power was restored just after 1pm, but for some it was too soon - a rare late summer heat wave gave many workers an excuse to get outside for a few hours and enjoy the weather, a break they would never have been able to take if everything was working normally.