Press & reporter kit

Live, citable, embeddable US power-outage data — a national county-grain baseline from federal ODIN data plus live feeds from hundreds of utilities, with an independent restoration estimate we grade publicly.

When's the Power Back? editorial · last reviewed 2026-07-30

During a storm: what to point readers at

A state overview: whensthepowerback.com/outage/<state>/ — e.g. /outage/oh/ — live county rankings, refreshed about every 15 minutes.
A county or city page: /outage/<state>/<county> — live customer counts, the utility's official restoration time when posted, and our independent estimate beside it.
Event articles: major outages auto-publish structured summaries at /news/ with frozen as-of numbers plus a live counter.

How to cite

Attribute as “When's the Power Back, a national outage tracker” with a link. Our aggregate statistics — the accuracy record and the restoration-time reliability figures — are quotable with that attribution (terms); the exact convention, dataset URL, and versioning are on the research page's “How to cite” section. Numbers on live pages carry their own as-of timestamps — cite the timestamp with the number.

What makes this source different

We grade ourselves in public. Every completed restoration estimate is scored against when power actually returned — including misses — on the accuracy page, under a versioned methodology.
We grade the utilities too. How often utility-posted restoration times moved later, with sample sizes and thresholds: the published analysis.
Independent and unofficial — not affiliated with any utility or government agency. For emergencies, readers belong with 911 and their utility, and our pages say so.

Embed the live widget

A small live status card for any US county — drop it into a storm liveblog or a weather page once and it tracks every event hands-off:

<iframe src="https://whensthepowerback.com/embed/?fips=39035&name=Cuyahoga,%20OH"
        width="320" height="150" style="border:0" title="Live outage status"></iframe>

Params: fips (5-digit county FIPS, required — it's on every county page URL's data), name (optional label), theme=dark|light. The card carries a small attribution link back to the county's live page — please keep it; it is the only thing we ask for.

Reach us

Media inquiries via the contact form — include your outlet and a reply address. For background on who runs this and how it's made: About · Data sources.