In the dark: Major power outage hits Amsterdam

Large parts of Amsterdam have been hit by a power outage, snarling traffic around the city as trains and trams were halted and many electric road signs stopped working.

Electricity provider Liander said that 360,000 homes were left without power in the early hours of Tuesday. As engineers scrambled to fix the problem, power was finally restored to homes throughout the city by just after 8 a.m. (0700 GMT), but thousands of people in the nearby town of Zaandam were still cut off.

National railroad operator NS warned that the ripple effects of the outage were spreading around the country as commuters arrived at stations to find trains to and from Amsterdam weren't running.

It wasn't immediately clear what caused the outage.