Strong thunderstorms knocked out power across Minnesota overnight and into Wednesday morning, leaving just over 52,000 Xcel Energy customers without electricity statewide by 5 a.m. The utility counted about 579 outages as severe weather moved through the state.

That is why people are searching the Xcel Energy outage map before sunrise Wednesday: the outage total was still climbing while storms were moving through western, southern and central Minnesota and into western Wisconsin. Around 3 a.m., a line of thunderstorms pushed into the Twin Cities metro, bringing reports of wind gusts above 40 mph, thunder and lightning.

Severe thunderstorm warnings were issued across parts of Minnesota early Wednesday, including portions of the northeast Twin Cities metro, with gusts above 60 mph possible along with heavy rain. Xcel Energy said it had been monitoring the threat Tuesday night and was preparing crews to respond, but the spread of outages showed how quickly the system was hit as the weather developed.

The utility said crews were ready to restore service and would focus first on the largest outages so the greatest number of customers could get power back as quickly as possible. Customers can report outages and track restoration efforts on Xcel Energy's outage map, but the company did not give a timetable for when all service would be restored.