(Reuters) - Almost 1.3 million homes and businesses were still without power in the U.S. Southeast and Midwest on Wednesday after Helene slammed into the Florida Panhandle as a major hurricane on Sept. 26, according to data from PowerOutage.us.

Those outages were down from around 1.7 million on Tuesday as utilities continued to restore power. In total, the storm knocked out service to around 5.5 million customers, predominantly in the Southeast.

Helene's winds, rain and storm surge killed more than 160 people.

The utility with the most outages was U.S. energy company Duke Energy in the Carolinas with about 323,000 customers still out in South Carolina and 299,000 still out in North Carolina, according to PowerOutage.us.

Duke said on Tuesday it had restored power to around 1.6 million customers in the Carolinas and expected to restore the majority of remaining outages by Friday night.

Here are the major outages by state:

State Outages

South Carolina 492,000

Georgia 365,000

North Carolina 341,000

Virginia 44,000

Florida 42,000

West Virginia 11,000

Total Out 1,295,000

(Reporting by Scott DiSavino; editing by Jonathan Oatis)