Most states have many electric utilities, many small, some big, and with these large numbers of companies it can be hard to get a true overall status of the power grid in a particular area. This project collects information from over 650 Utilities into one place, with more being added all the time. Making this site the most complete source of power outage information currently available.

Most Utilities put very little resources behind their publicly facing OMSs (Outage Management Systems), they are more focused on getting their customers reconnected, as they should be. However this means that during big events where lots of people want to know the status of the power in a particular area, the Utility’s OMS will tend to be overwhelmed if not completely unresponsive. Meanwhile PowerOutage.us has stood up to huge amounts of traffic without faltering. Allowing people directly affected by an outage event and onlookers to stay informed and up to date. Making this site one of the most reliable sources of power outage information available.

In addition, no utility releases detailed historical power outage information, so we store all of the information we collect. Making this project the only source of detailed historical power outage information. While this data is not available on the site, you can contact us for more information.

You can view information about our bot here: About/Bot

I started creating this as part of a fascination with watching power outage maps during big storms as a kid and now as part of my fascination with unique datasets as an adult. I like working on interesting projects and for a while have wanted to build something big that others could use and find interest in.

Be warned I am working on this Project in my spare time so updates and changes will come slowly.

The Census Bureau, the geometry data for the detailed maps.

MapBox, the code for drawing the detailed maps.

Outage data will only be as accurate as the Utility reports it. I try to detect and handle if a utility site breaks and/or reports inaccurate data but in some cases it is essentially impossible to discern the difference. During major events, I will be monitoring the status of many parts of PowerOutage.us including the data imports and will address any unhandled issues ASAP.

Many small companies do not report outage information online, in these cases there is nothing I can do to collect this information. If your utility is one of these then you can help! Call them up, E-mail them, or reach out to them on social media and let them know you want to have them add a public outage reporting system.

Also, keep in mind I am working on this Project in my spare time so updates and changes will come slowly. If you have any questions, or see any issues on the site, please do reach out to me!

Update 2021/02/09

v0.9.1 Change Log
API:
Version 1.4.4 released!
Added Planned Outage REST API endpoint

Update 2020/08/21

v0.9.0 Change Log
Passed 700 Utilities tracked, 148 Million Customers Tracked!
System:
Finished step one of system upgrades for adding more countries outside of US/CA.
Added Virgin Islands, Bermuda, and Cayman Islands, added hidden placeholders for other US territories.
Website:
Improved state, county, and utility pages for mobile use.
Fixed a redirect issue with a Canadian page causing an extra 10-20ms of page load time.
API:
Version 1.4.2 release!
Added GeoJson Outage REST API endpoint
Fixed bug in API v1.4 where OutageCount parameter was ignored for some REST API calls.
Added country filter parameter to the CSV API endpoint

Update 2020/04/29

v0.8.4 Change Log
Passed 675 Utilities tracked, 144 Million Customers Tracked!
Website:
Fixed some spacing issues on a few pages for really small mobile screens.
Minor performance tweeks to help with better cacheing sitewide
Fix Provence-> Province spelling
Added Geo data for British Columbia and Ontario counties
Changed state level map legends to be more specific and added an additional outage level.
API:
Version 1.4 release!
Added support for multiple versions to allow customers more time to transition to new versions of the API.
Added support for ASCII encoding for systems that do not support UTF8
Added OutageGeoData API endpoint for providing live raw individual outage information.

Update 2019/12/02

v0.8.3 Change Log
Website:
Minor improvments to the website
Redisigned the About page
API:
Added Country filters to API endpoints

Update 2019/10/06

v0.8.2.1 Change Log
Website & API:
Built and implemented a 2nd cache layer between the Database and API/Website.
This will help improve performance during large events and improve overall site performance.

Update 2019/09/22

Passed 640 Utilities tracked, 134 Million Customers Tracked!
v0.8.2 Change Log
Website:
Fixed a few minor display bugs for Google Chrome web browsers,
Added improvments to Canada pages on poweroutage.com/ca
API:
Fixed a performance bug that caused City based API requests to take an additional 1-1.5 seconds to complete.

Update 2019/06/13

Passed 600 Utilities tracked, 126 Million Customers Tracked!
v0.8.1 Change Log
Website:
Fixed Open Graph tag issues,
Eliminated a few situations that caused multiple redirects,
Added an abuse tracking system,
Other small GUI tweeks

Update 2019/03/03

v0.8.0 Change Log
Website:
Integrated in the PowerOutage.com domain.
Added new hover-over tooltips for viewing detailed power outage information on the maps.
Added pages for Canada Power Outages.
Updated Major Events page.
Added Apple Touch icons for IOS based devices.
Fixed a few minor bugs with viewing the maps on tiny screens.

Map Widget:
Added new hover-over tooltips for viewing detailed power outage information.
Added access to county level maps.
Added a few new customization parameters.

Update 2018/08/26

v0.7.11 Change Log
Website:
Major updates behind the scenes pre-paring to add aditional countires
Major updates behind the scenes pre-paring for the integration with PowerOutage.com and PowerOutage.eu
Fixed a bug in the response headers that allowed frame linking to pages in the site.
Fixed a bug that was preventing auto redirection to https.
Added a products page.
API:
Added a CSV endpoint to the PowerOutage.us REST API
Added US Federal Information Processing Standards Ids to State and County responses
A parameter "ReturnURLs" has been added to getutilityoutageinfo method

Update 2018/06/27

v0.7.10 Change Log
Load map javascript from 1st party server instead of 3rd party server.
Merged a few server get requests down to one.
Added a check for if WebGL is enabled and displays a friendly error message.
Added additional specific error catching and resolution for map loading.
Cleaned up the wording for errors sent to the console.
Implemented a minor UI update to the Map Widget for business customers.

Update 2018/05/13

v0.7.9 Change Log
Fixed a bug causing the maps to not load in specific circumstances.

Update 2018/04/15

v0.7.8 Change Log
Made a few small website improvements
Made a major Update to the API for business customers.
Removed Puerto Rico :( our source for information about PR is no longer being updated.

Update 2018/03/16

Passed 500 Utilities tracked!
v0.7.7 Change Log
Updated so DateTimes are now shown in the browser's local timezone.
Improved script error handling to prevent map loading issues from non-critical errors.
Fixed some resource calls to improve efficiency.
Created tools to help me detect and respond to data issues faster and easier.

Update 2018/03/02

v0.7.6 Change Log
Fixed the 404 page which was broken by the last SEO update.
In specific circumstances it would throw a 500 error instead of loading the 404/home page.

Update 2018/02/11

v0.7.5 Change Log
Updated Privacy Policy
Updated About Page with more information
Made a few small usability improvements
Implemented a few SEO changes, like all URLs now redirect to their lowercase version.

Update 2018/01/01

Passed 113 Million Customers Tracked, from 429 different Utilities. All states now have at least one tracked Utility Added!
v0.7.4 Change Log
Added map to Regions page.
Made a few other usability improvements.
Laid the ground work for greatly improving the County Pages.

Update 2017/11/14

Passed 110 Million Customers Tracked, from 367 different Utilities.
v0.7.3 Change Log
Bug fixes for the new Firefox Quantum web browser.
Plus some other behind the scenes enhancements.

Update 2017/10/28

Passed 100 Million Customers Tracked, from 330 different Utilities.
v0.7.2 Change Log
Added Non continental states to the home page
Made usability enhancements for users with disabled javascript.

Update 2017/09/17

The site is now up to 228 Utilities Tracked covering 77 Million Customers.
v0.7.1 Change Log
Did a lot of backend work, Including adding a process to fill in missing information, AKA if a Utility only gives outage information at the city level I can now translate that into County level outages as well.
Also added a page to document Major events.

Update 2017/09/04

v0.7.0 Change Log
Made a bunch of UI updates including county pages, county maps on state page, County Utility pages, improved overall formatting of the site, improved URLs across the site.
Also added more Electric Utilities reached 200 Utilities tracked, 70 Million Customers Tracked!
Side note: The site tracked a max of 309,204 Outages caused by Hurricane Harvey at 2017/08/28 2:32PM GMT

Update 2017/08/20

v0.6.1 Change Log
Finished adding all the electric utilities I could find for the states in the Mid-Atlantic region.
We are now tracking outages for over 50 Million Customers!

Update 2017/07/30

v0.6.0 Change Log
Finished a rewrite of the underlining database,
This rewrite will allow for improved reporting, improved historical records, and a more efficient site.

Update 2017/03/26

Updated the site to improve efficiency and cacheability of the new mapping system.

Update 2017/03/20

Updated the site to use much better higher resolution maps, and made the maps clickable taking the user to the corresponding page for that area.

Update 2017/03/14

Adding more and more power companies, just passed the 150th company added today. Thirteen states have been completed, and seven partially completed.

Update 2017/02/13

Finished adding all the electric utilities I could find for the states in the New England region.

Update 2016/11/14

Completed a major backend upgrade, completely rewrote the program that fetches outages and Updated Website to allow users to drill down and see specific Provider and County outages where data is available.

Update 2016/10/06

Added South East States for Hurricane Matthew. Updated site formatting and moved about info and updates to its own about page.

Update 2016/07/22

Updated the site to be small screen/mobile friendly. Added region and state specific outage pages. Also a lot of work has been done on improving the backend databases and improving overall site efficiency.
The plan is now to now go forward and start adding more states.

Update 2016/06/05

New England's power is now being tracked, and a new interface has been implemented, giving a graphical representation of the US and its current power grid status.
The next tasks are state specific statistics and adding more states to the tracking application.

Update 2016/04/03

Currently the data collection process is being worked on, and at this point I am tracking data for most of New England.
Once New England data collection is fully set up I will focus on getting the data represented here.