Office workers and shoppers in Kuala Lumpur were left without power or lighting today when a large part of the city was hit with an electricity outage.

At least four main roads and a section of the central "Golden Triangle", including a string of five-star hotels, were affected by the outage which lasted about an hour.

An official with national electricity company Tenaga Nasional said the failure occurred because of a fault in a substation supplying those areas.

"The first call we received was about 4 o'clock and the fault was rectified about 4.55," said a complaints officer with the power company.

Although not frequent, power failures in Kuala Lumpur and surrounding suburbs occur on a regular basis.