ORLANDO, Fla. — More than 600,000 Central Florida customers are without power Thursday morning, after high winds from Hurricane Milton brought down utility lines throughout the region.

Volusia and Lake counties had the highest rate of outages in the region, with more than half of utility customers left in the dark after the storm roared through the middle of the state, according to poweroutage.us, which collects data from utilities nationwide.

In Mount Dora, for instance, roughly 54% of the city’s utility customers had lost power as of early Thursday morning and winds were still too high for workers to begin restoring electricity to households, according to an email from city officials.

In Orange County, about one in five customers were without electricity, according to the site. Duke Energy reported particularly high numbers of outages in the west Orange and south Lake areas, according to a map on the utility’s website. In Osceola and Seminole counties, just under a quarter of customers were without power on Thursday morning.

Some OUC customers are reporting on social media they are having issues reporting power outages to the utility.

OUC posted this message on its website, “Due to the large number of outages, some customers may experience difficulty reporting an outage. If this occurs, please call 407-423-9018 to speak to a representative. Outages only need to be reported once. When it is safe enough to do so, crews are ready to assess damage and respond to outages caused by Hurricane Milton. Thanks for your patience while we wait until it is safe for our teams to respond.”

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