At approximately 10:00 a.m., Friday morning, a power outage hit portions of downtown Bozeman.

Outages were reported as far north as Oak Street, and businesses and residences in the immediate downtown area on Mendenhall, Main and Babcock were affected as well.

A spokesman for Northwestern Energy indicated that the loss of power affected around 1,300 people and lasted for about 10 minutes.

Many traffic signals in the area were down as well.

Northwestern Energy spokesman Butch Larkin says that a squirrel was to blame for the outage.

Larkin says that it's actually a common occurrence when there is an electrical outage. He says that squirrels and other rodents can get up in power lines and connect them with their bodies, causing an outage.

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