Lights flickered out across the eastern part of the state at the height of the blizzard Tuesday, with power outages in every town on Cape Cod, and all of Nantucket going dark. By contrast, few outages were reported on the Vineyard during the first major snowstorm of the season.

National Grid, which serves Nantucket and other communities throughout the Northeast, reported Tuesday that outages had affected a total of 15,300 of its customers, including about 12,700 on Nantucket. By Wednesday evening, power had been restored to about two-thirds of the homes on Nantucket, and a fleet of trucks and workers had arrived to continue the repairs.

The power company NStar, which supplies energy to much of the state, including the Vineyard and the Cape, reported Wednesday that power had

been restored to more than 60,000 of its customers, and that it expected most of the remaining connections to be restored by the end of the day. An outage map on the company’s website showed only one outage on the Vineyard as of Wednesday afternoon, and none by sundown.

Reached by email on Wednesday, NStar spokesperson Rhiannon D’Angelo declined an interview but drew attention to an undersea cable between Falmouth and the Vineyard that was installed last year to improve reliability on the Island. “Along with this new cable came new, stronger poles and upgraded electrical equipment on land to receive the power the new cable is now delivering,” she wrote.

The new cable replaced an earlier one that was irreparably damaged in 2011. It is one of several electric cables connecting the Island to the mainland. Both the cable and the new poles were part of a long-term plan to improve service to the Island.

In 2013 the company installed 44 new poles and 282 replacement poles around the Vineyard, a project that raised concerns, mostly related to the greater size of the new poles. The Martha’s Vineyard Commission reviewed the project as a development. Among other things, the commission required that NStar consult with Oak Bluffs, Tisbury and Edgartown on landscaping the areas around the poles, and work with them on a case-by-case basis for further maintenance. Last spring, NStar completed a three-year, $20 million “self-healing” project to improve reliability for its customers. According to a statement issued at the time, the project “included the installation of hundreds of automated switches, making NStar’s electric system one of the most modern in the country.” It also allowed the company to “automatically isolate certain outages, reroute power around those outages, and even eliminate them without ever having to deploy a truck or crew. As a result, customers are experiencing fewer and shorter outages.”

Ferry service was suspended for duration of storm. — Ivy Ashe

In a statement, NStar said the heavy snowfall and high winds on Tuesday had brought down trees and tree limbs, damaging the company’s electric system and hampering repair efforts. Poor road conditions and coastal flooding also slowed the response. But on Tuesday it had already restored power to about 25,000 customers, “largely through the use of remote switching technology installed across its system.”

The Inquirer and Mirror on Nantucket reported six to eight inches of snowfall on Wednesday morning. About 20 inches were reported in Edgartown. William Pittman, Nantucket’s police chief and emergency response director, reported winds that were only slightly stronger than on the Vineyard.

“The difference was the power failures,” he said. “That was just a catastrophic series of events that couldn’t be prevented, nor did we foresee it.” Nantucket also lost Internet, television, and in some places phone service during the storm. The storm passed about 160 miles southeast of Nantucket.

“The biggest problem was that the main feeder to the island got disconnected,” Mr. Pittman said. The two cables from the mainland terminate in the harbor area, he said, which flooded during the storm. “Basically, the transformers iced up and once that happened, that tripped all the breakers on the mainland, and that shut everything down.” Restarting the system required extensive work around the island.

He added that a breach in Nantucket Harbor similar to the one that opened several years ago at Norton Point on Chappaquiddick likely contributed to the flooding. Other damage on Nantucket included at least six downed telephone poles and several others that were compromised during the storm.

Town officials and emergency personnel from across the Vineyard reported little or no damage to roads and infrastructure on Tuesday and Wednesday, with the exception of one fallen tree in West Tisbury.

NStar representatives could not be reached for further comment, citing the need to devote their full attention to the restoration efforts on the Cape and south shore, which were hit much harder than the Vineyard.