Hawaiian Electric Co. was looking into the cause of an outage that left 1,200 customers without power in the downtown area Tuesday afternoon.

The outage began about 12:30 p.m. and electricity was restored about 3 p.m., said HECO spokesman Darren Pai. Power was knocked out to businesses and residents in the Aala and Liliha areas through downtown to near the State Office Tower on Beretania Street, he said.

Five state office buildings were affected by the outage, said Russ Saito, state comptroller. He said about 1,100 employees work in those buildings and they were given the option to leave.

"Because the power was out and at the time Hawaiian Electric was projecting a restoral time that was late afternoon, we told the employees in those buildings that if they couldn't make alternate arrangements to leave," Saito said.

Pai said there was a report of a problem at a manhole near a HECO substation on School Street, but he said it was not known if that was the source of the outage.