Data sources & how they refresh

Everything on the site comes from the public sources below. "Live" means refreshed on the schedules listed below — not second-by-second.

ODIN — the U.S. Department of Energy's county outage data (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

The nationwide county-by-county count: how many customers each participating utility reports out. Public-domain federal data. We refresh it about every 15 minutes. ODIN covers the vast majority of US electricity customers, but participation and update speed vary by utility — a brand-new outage can take a cycle or two to appear, and a few utilities don't report at all. Missing data is not the same as zero outages.

Coverage vs. activity: ODIN typically includes utilities from ~35–50 states and territories at any moment, including ones with zero customers out — that number describes coverage, not outages. The homepage's "states & territories with outages" count is deliberately different: it includes only places with customers currently reported out in our combined picture — the federal county counts plus the utilities' own live data (incl. Puerto Rico and DC).

Utility outage maps (extra local detail)

For ~520 utilities we also read the utility's own public outage map — the same data behind the map on their website — which adds city/area-level counts and any restoration time the utility has posted. These are read on a rotating cycle, not all at once: our system checks every couple of minutes but reads a portion of the utilities each time, taking utilities with active outages first and the largest outages ahead of the smallest. So the numbers we have for a utility are typically 10–15 minutes old, and can be half an hour old for a small utility — the biggest active outages refresh fastest.

Wherever we show a utility's numbers we print the time we last read that utility's data beside them; that timestamp, not this page, is the authority on how fresh a particular number is. Where a utility publishes no such map, you'll see only the county-level federal count ("coverage: county-level reporting").

National Weather Service (NWS)

Active weather alerts (warnings, watches, advisories) by county — public-domain, refreshed along with the county-level counts about every 15 minutes. Used for context and for the restoration estimate's weather awareness.

HIFLD electric territories

The federal Electric Retail Service Territories map of which utility serves which area — first published through Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD), now credited to Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Department of Energy. Used to answer "who's my utility?" when you search an address. Territory boundaries are approximate and can overlap (some places are served by more than one company).

Geocoding — Zippopotam, OpenStreetMap/Nominatim, GeoNames, Census, FCC

Turning your ZIP, city, or address into a location, and that location into a county. OpenStreetMap data © OpenStreetMap contributors. ZIP-to-town names include data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Lookups happen on demand when you search; nothing about your search is stored.

Why this site can differ from your utility's map

Utilities update their own maps on their own schedule; our county-level count refreshes ~every 15 minutes — the two can be minutes apart in either direction.
Some utilities report "customers out" differently (meters vs. accounts vs. separate outage reports); we show what each source reports.
Our restoration estimate is independent — it's computed from the live recovery pattern, not copied from the utility. When the utility posts an official time, we show both, labeled separately. See how accurate our estimates are.
County-level numbers can lag or smooth over street-level reality — your circuit may be restored earlier or later than the county-wide picture.

Known gaps

A small share of co-ops and municipal utilities publish no outage data our software can read, so they appear only in the federal county-level count, or not at all.
During the largest storms, the sources we read can time out or briefly go stale — the site says "Data delayed" rather than guessing.
Territory and geocoding lookups are approximate near boundaries.

Site analytics

Our pages load these measurement tools; the privacy policy sets out exactly what each one collects:

Our own counter: first-party and cookieless. It stores no IP address, cookie or persistent identifier; daily unique counts use a one-way token that changes every day.
Google Analytics, the measurement ad networks require. It sets its own cookies (_ga); its ads-personalization feature (Google Signals) is turned off.
Mediavine's Grow script, audience measurement for our ad partners. Its reader buttons are hidden here.
Impact.com's affiliate tag, on the homepage only.

What you type in the search box is never stored — a search records only whether it found a place and, if so, the state and county it matched; a typed street address goes to the geocoder to answer your question and nowhere else. Turn all four off on this device any time by visiting whensthepowerback.com/?notrack=1 (and back on with ?notrack=0); that also stops our alert-signup and notification-tap counts, and outage alerts themselves keep working. Our host, Cloudflare, adds two things of its own that the switch does not reach: a cookieless page-speed beacon, and a bot check that stores its result in one security cookie (cf_clearance).

Independent and unofficial — not affiliated with any utility, the Department of Energy, or the National Weather Service. For emergencies always follow official guidance.