A power cut plunged shops at an MTR station into darkness on Wednesday, just hours after a wider outage on Hong Kong Island trapped people in lifts and caused traffic lights to malfunction.

At least a dozen shops at Hong Kong Station were left without electricity for more than an hour in the latest incident, although train services are believed to have carried on running as usual.

It's not clear whether the two outages are connected, with HK Electric blaming a supply fault for causing a voltage dip earlier in the day.

“We couldn’t open on time at noon and could only start doing business again at around 3pm. We lost quite a lot of money," said a health food shop worker surnamed Mak.

She added that she received no useful information from station officials about what was going on.

“I asked them how long it would take them to fix the power, but they said they didn't know and told me to just wait. I then waited for over an hour and nothing happened.”