About When's the Power Back?

An independent power-outage tracker for the US and Canada, built around one idea: you should be able to find your location and get the most specific, honest answer available about whether the power is out and when it's likely back — for free.

When's the Power Back? editorial · Updated October 9, 2026

What we do

Enter a ZIP or postal code, an address, or share your location, and we combine two layers of public data:

Free county-level counts from federal data — outage counts by county from the U.S. Department of Energy / Oak Ridge National Laboratory ODIN county outage data, which counts the customers out for each utility that reports into it, plus active weather alerts from the National Weather Service. That federal data doesn't include Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands or Canada; there, our counts come only from the utilities whose own outage maps we read.
Deeper, live detail where a utility publishes it — for hundreds of individual electric utilities in the US and Canada we read their own public outage maps directly, so you see city- and neighborhood-level counts and the utility's posted restoration time.

On top of that, we compute an independent restoration estimate from each outage's own recovery trend, leaning on what past outages in the same place did while that trend is still thin — and we show it whether or not your utility has posted an official time.

Who publishes this

When's the Power Back? is an independent project, not a utility, government agency, or reseller of a commercial outage database. Our guides and pages like this one are published under organizational authorship ("When's the Power Back? editorial") — we don't invent fake author personas. Each shows the date it was last updated, and the site's operator is responsible for what the site publishes; the editorial policy explains how pages are produced and reviewed. For anything you'd normally email an author about, use the contact page.

Editorial standards

Every number traces to a public source. Outage counts come from the utilities' and ODIN's own reported figures, and we never add outages a source didn't report; where a utility's area-by-area counts and its own total disagree, we reconcile the two before placing its outages in counties, by rules the methodology sets out. Where the number we display (the utilities' own numbers combined with the federal county count) differs from the federal county count alone, we say so on the page.
Guides link their sources. Our safety and preparedness guides link the public sources their advice draws on — among them Ready.gov, the CDC, FoodSafety.gov, the FDA, the CPSC, the American Red Cross and HHS — and are general safety information, not medical or legal advice.
We grade our own estimates in public. When a county outage that reached 200 or more customers ends, our county-wide estimate is re-run at each of its readings after its peak where the time was not withheld, from the outage's own recovery trend, and scored against when power actually came back (the methodology says which readings count). The accuracy page publishes the results, misses included: figures over the most recently graded outages, and the newest graded examples. We also grade, by the same yardstick, the restoration times utilities post through the federal county outage data.
News publishing is closed. Software drafts reports on major outages from the live data, but none can be published — by a person or automatically — until our publishing tool shows the reviewer the full article as readers would see it, its sources and how it interprets them. Until October 6, 2026, a person could publish a draft after reading only its headline, summary and key figures, and until October 1, 2026, drafts above a size we set in advance were published automatically, without a person reading them first; those articles have been taken down. Drafts contain no quotes, and their outage figures come from the same live data our pages show.
Corrections. If a number or claim is wrong, tell us via the contact page and we'll fix it; a corrected guide, or a page like this one, shows the date it was updated — the process is documented in our editorial policy, and every correction to what the site told readers is listed, dated, in the corrections log.

The full policy — what software does, what humans decide, sourcing rules, authorship, and corrections — is at /editorial-policy.

How the data works — in the open

We document where our outage counts, weather alerts, utility territories and location lookups come from — and how often the live ones refresh — on the data sources page; how the restoration estimates are computed on the methodology page; and how they have scored on the accuracy page. Live status refreshes about every 15 minutes. Utilities with active outages are read first, so their detail usually updates sooner, though some utilities' maps can only be read about every 15 minutes. Not every utility reports into these sources — missing data is not the same as zero outages, and we label it that way.

Privacy

You can use the site without an account or a login. Our own analytics set no cookies and keep no IP address, nothing you type into the search box, and no identifier that lasts beyond a day. For audience measurement we also run Google Analytics (Signals off) and Mediavine's Grow script on public pages, which can set cookies of their own, and our homepage requests an Impact.com affiliate tag; ?notrack=1 opts this browser out of all of those. Our host, Cloudflare, adds a cookieless page-speed beacon and a bot check that sets one security cookie; that switch does not reach them. The full details of what is and isn't collected are in the privacy policy.

In an emergency, don't rely on any tracker: a downed line, fire, or medical need is a call to 911 and to your utility's outage line. When's the Power Back? reports conditions — it does not dispatch crews.

Questions, corrections, or coverage requests? See the contact page.