Almost 7000 properties in the Selwyn district had power cut on Wednesday morning after an unplanned outage.

The outage affected about 6990 properties in Rolleston, Lincoln Broadfield, Burnham, Ellesmere, Greenpark and Irwell.

Orion said the power cut started at 8.51am and the cause was being investigated.

The power was restored by about 11am.

"We are investigating this outage and are looking into reports of possible causes.

"In the meantime, we have begun restoring power.

"We’d like to thank our customers for their patience and update information on the outage is available on our website."

-Allied Media