The North Sea's Buzzard oilfield is restarting after a brief production outage on Wednesday night, a spokeswoman for its operator Nexen confirmed.

Buzzard is the largest of the fields that contribute to the Forties crude blend, the most important of the North Sea crudes underpinning the Brent crude benchmark.

The field, which is the single biggest contributor to the Forties crude stream, normally pumps about 170,000-180,000 barrels per day (bpd).

"It's slowly coming back up," one oil trader told the Reuters news agency.

The price of Brent crude oil rose slightly on Friday after the power outage.

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