How to read your outage result

Search an address, a ZIP code or a city

Type an address, a ZIP code or a city into the box on the homepage, or tap the location button. The site finds the county the point is in and, from a federal map of utility service territories, the utilities that may serve it, then reads their outage numbers. What you type is used for the search and is not stored (the privacy policy has the details). The result describes the county and, where a utility publishes finer detail, the places in it; it never describes your own street or home.

The headline: customers out in your county

The first line is the county's count, for example "1,170 customers out in Los Angeles, CA". A customer is a utility account, usually one home or business, not one person. Under it the result says who reported the number: "live from" a utility's own outage map when we read that utility's map, or the slower nationwide county tally from the U.S. Department of Energy, which updates about every 15 minutes. When the two disagree, the result names both numbers rather than picking one silently. Every source and how often it refreshes is on the sources page.

Outages near you

Where a utility publishes individual outages or city-level counts, the result lists the largest ones in the county, with the place, how many customers each has out and its own status (for example "holding steady — no clear recovery yet"), and points to the rest in the utility's city-by-city detail. A button for each utility we read opens that detail: per-city counts, the utility's restoration times and a map of affected areas.

Two different times: the utility's and ours

A restoration time the utility has posted is shown as the utility's, under its name ("Southern California Edison says: back by …"). Our own estimate sits in its own box, labeled "Est. recovery", and is computed from how quickly customers in the county are getting power back. It says plainly when it can't give a time: "holding steady — no clear recovery yet", "grew sharply just now", or "gathering data". A county-wide estimate describes the county as a whole, so your neighborhood can come back earlier or later. How it works is in how our restoration forecast works; how it has done, misses included, is on the accuracy page and in four graded outages.

When it says no outages, or no count

"No outages reported in Washington County right now" means the utilities and federal data we read report none there. It can't confirm the power at a single address: a single home's outage, or one on a small line, may not appear in any published count yet. If your power is out, report it to your utility; the result links its outage page.

Some places have no live source at all. The federal county data includes no counts for Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands, and where we also don't read a utility's own map, the result says "No live outage count" instead of a number. In Puerto Rico, the utility reports by region rather than by municipio, and the result says so. The marker at the top of the page says when the numbers last changed ("Updated 4 min ago") and turns amber when the federal tally falls behind; a county's own page then says the count is delayed and when it last updated, and shows no estimate until fresh numbers arrive.

The rest of the result

• Weather alerts from the National Weather Service appear as small tags, but only alerts of a kind that can cause outages, such as wind, storm, winter, heat or flood warnings.
• Utilities serving this area come from the federal territory map, which can list more than one utility for a point; entering a full street address on your utility's own site tells you which one is yours.
• Keep me updated turns on a browser notification for the county, or for one city in it: one when an outage is detected, one when a dependable estimate is ready, and an all-clear when about 90% of customers are back. It needs no email and no account.
• A line says how often the county has a sizable outage, with the size, the share of time and how many days of readings it rests on; it is a county figure, not a rating of any street or home (how it is measured).
• Each county's own page adds its outage history: the last significant outage, a typical restoration time, and a table of every outage behind those figures.

On a phone or a slow connection

The search works the same on a phone. On a slow connection, a search you start before the page has finished loading is kept: the result says the search is starting and answers once the page is ready. The address search needs JavaScript; without it, you can still browse current outages by state and county, and each county page shows its live count.