Major outages · 2015–2025

When the country went dark

Every time more than 600,000 customers were without power across the US at the same moment.

Outages: 72
Largest: 9.2M
Hours lost: 4.4B
Busiest year: 2023

Peak customers out, by date

Each spike is one outage: its height is the most customers out at once, its colour the weather on record. Select one to open it.

Ranked

The ten largest

Measured three ways. An outage that cuts many customers briefly can rank below a smaller one that lasts for days.

Weather on record

What was passing through

Tropical cyclones were on record for 19 of the 72 outages but 62% of all the customer-hours lost.

The storm type reported in the affected counties as each outage began. It shows the two happened together, not that one caused the other. How outages are matched

Weather	Outages	Share of outages and of customer-hours	Largest
Tropical cyclone	19	26% 62%	Hurricane Irma9.2M out at peak
Thunderstorms	28	39% 15%	Aug 10, 20201.6M out at peak
Windstorm	16	22% 11%	Mar 2, 20182.6M out at peak
Winter storm	5	7% 10%	Feb 13, 20214.8M out at peak
Ice storm	2	3% 2%	Feb 22, 20231.1M out at peak
Wildfire	1	1% <1%	Sep 8, 2020837k out at peak
Flooding	1	1% <1%	Jan 13, 2021755k out at peak

Every outage

All 72, one line each

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Curve: customers out in the affected counties from a day before each outage to four days after, scaled to that outage's own peak. Customer-hours add up every hour each customer was without power. Sources · Methodology