About Outage Pro

Built for the hours when a storm or outage is occurring

When the power goes out, most people want two things: whether it is just them, and how long it might last. Utilities publish that information, but it is scattered across hundreds of separate sites in hundreds of different formats. We put it in one place so you are not hunting for it in the dark.

Why We Built It

We built this because checking on an outage was harder than it should be. If you wanted to know whether the outage on your street was part of something bigger, you had to find your utility's site, work out how they present their numbers, and then do the same again for the next county. That is a lot of work at the exact moment nobody has the patience for it.

Where the numbers come from

Utilities publish their own outage counts, and almost every one of them does it differently. Some update every few minutes, some every half hour. Some report by county, some by service area. Some go down when demand spikes. We read those sources continuously, clean them up, and turn them into one set of numbers that reads the same way everywhere.

That means two things worth knowing. First, our numbers come from the utilities themselves, so we are reporting what they report. Second, when a utility's own feed goes quiet, we say so rather than guessing. If a source has not updated in over a day, we mark it and leave it out of the totals instead of quietly showing a stale figure.

Every value on the site carries the time it was captured, in Eastern time. If you are citing a number in a briefing or an article, you can say exactly what moment it describes.

How we measure coverage

We publish a coverage figure on the site, and it is worth explaining what it counts. It is the share of US electricity customers served by the utilities we monitor, measured against the U.S. Energy Information Administration's count of total US electricity customers. It is not a guess and it is not a marketing number. When the figure moves, it is because we added or lost sources, not because we changed the maths.

Coverage today spans all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It does not cover every utility in the country, and we would rather say that plainly than imply we see everything.

What else you can do here

The map is the starting point. From the national view you can drill into a state, then a county, then the utilities serving that county, and the numbers re-scope as you go. Around that, a few things are built for specific jobs:

• Outage alerts. Follow the places you care about and get told by email, text or push when outages cross a level you set.
• Playback. Step back through the last few days to see how an event built and where it moved, and export it as a shareable image.
• Electricity rates. What power costs in every state, updated from published federal data.
• Embeddable map. A version of the map that partners can put on their own site.
• API. The same data as REST and JSON, with webhooks and optional county boundaries, for teams building their own tools.