Sept 27 (Reuters) - Over 4.4 million homes and businesses in Florida,

Georgia, the Carolinas and other U.S. Southeastern and Midwestern 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, Georgia and South Carolina,

utilities in those states have started to restore power. In total, Helene

knocked out service to over 5.2 million customers.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center forecast the remnants of Helene, now a

tropical depression, would remain over Tennessee and Kentucky over the weekend.

Duke Energy ( DUK ) in North Carolina currently has the most outages with

around 614,914 of its roughly 4.3 million customers in the state lacking

service, according to PowerOutage.us.

Duke Energy ( DUK ) has started power restoration efforts in the Carolinas, the

company said in a statement.

"Several areas of the state were severely devastated by this storm, so it's

safe to say power restoration is going to be a multi-day event," Todd Fountain,

Duke Energy Florida storm director, said in a statement.

Here are the major outages by state:

State Outages

South Carolina 1,190,312

Georgia 899,938

North Carolina 745,414

Florida 676,275

Virginia 231,920

Kentucky 209,451

Tennessee 87,652

West Virginia 87,602

Ohio 329,040

Total Out 4,457,000