There was no service on the Bakerloo line as of 3pm while Northern, Jubilee and Elizabeth line services were partially suspended.
By the Monday afternoon rush hour, the Transport for London (TfL) website showed at least three underground lines were suspended due to a power failure and there were severe delays and partial suspensions on at least six other lines.
A spokesman for TfL told the PA news agency there was an outage in southwest London for "a matter of minutes" and "everything shut down" because of a "National Grid issue".
None of the Overground lines were affected and TfL was in the process of "getting things back up and running again," the spokesman said.
TfL workers were seen directing passengers with suitcases away from Elizabeth line services at Paddington station, recommending they use buses to get across central London instead.
TfL staff said they did not know when the Bakerloo line entrance at Paddington would reopen.
"It was a power outage. The lights just went off, we don't know anything else," they said.
"It's been about an-hour-and-a-half now. We can't say when it will be fixed."
The transport authority said it was working with the National Grid to determine the cause of the outage.
"Due to a brief interruption of the power supply to our network, several lines lost power for a short period earlier this afternoon," TfL chief operating officer Claire Mann said in a statement.
"We are working to get the whole network up and running again as quickly as possible," she added.
The National Grid said there was a "fault" on its transmission network in central London and that it was "resolved within seconds".
with PA and AP
14°C