Factbox-Four million customers without power in US southeast from Helene

(Reuters) - Some 4 million homes and businesses in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and other U.S. southeast states were without power on Friday after Helene slammed into the Florida Panhandle as a major hurricane late on Thursday, according to data from PowerOutage.us.

Now that the storm has passed through Florida, utilities there have started to restore power.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecast the remnants of Helene, now a tropical storm, would move from the Georgia-South Carolina border to Tennessee and Kentucky over the weekend.

Southern Co's Georgia Power unit was the power company with the most outages, with around 706,000 of its 2.7 million customers lacking service, according to PowerOutage.us.

Georgia Power said on Thursday it had more than 10,000 personnel on the ground to respond to the storm. The company said its crews were responding to outages and restoring power where it was safe to do so as quickly as possible.

Here are the major outages by state:

State Outages

Florida 1,153,000

Georgia 1,057,000

North Carolina 440,000

South Carolina 1,300,000

Virginia 32,000

Tennessee 18,000

Total Out 4,000,000

(Reporting by Rahul Paswan in Bengaluru and Scott DiSavino in New York; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)