(Reuters) - More than 3 million homes and businesses have lost power in Florida, the major utilities said on Sunday, as Hurricane Irma pummeled the state.

Most outages were in Florida Power & Light's service area in the southern and eastern parts of the state. FPL, the state's biggest power company, said more than 2.9 million of its customers were without service, including about half in Miami-Dade County.

Irma approached Naples on the state's west coast with maximum sustained winds of 120 miles per hour (195 kph), making it a dangerous Category 3 storm, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center. It was downgraded on Sunday evening to Category 2, with maximum sustained wind gusts of 110 mph (175 kph), the National Hurricane Center said.

FPL is a unit of NextEra Energy Inc. Other big power utilities in Florida are units of Duke Energy Corp, Southern Co and Emera Inc. At midafternoon local time, they reported only scattered outages.

(Reporting by Scott DiSavino and Jessica Resnick-Ault in New York; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Peter Cooney)