Factbox - Around 1.16 mln customers lack power in U.S. Southeast after Michael

(Reuters) - Around 1,163,100 homes and businesses in the U.S. Southeast were without power on Thursday, according to local power companies, as the remnants of Hurricane Michael headed northeast over North Carolina after battering the Florida Panhandle.

That is down from a total of more than 1.2 million customers affected by Michael, as utilities in Florida, Alabama and Georgia restored service while the number of outages grew in the Carolinas and Virginia as the storm moved northeast.

Michael, the third most powerful storm ever to strike the U.S. mainland, weakened into a tropical storm over South Carolina. It made landfall on Wednesday afternoon as a Category 4 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale with maximum sustained winds of 155 miles per hour (250 kph).

(Reporting by Swati Verma in Bengaluru and Scott DiSavino in New York; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)