What a count means
Outage feeds usually count customer accounts or meters. One account can serve several people. A source row may represent an incident or a county aggregate; we do not present its row count as a count of physical outages.
Which source supplies a number
We select one count source per utility. A fresh, complete California snapshot takes priority for its four utilities; ODIN can provide a fresh fallback where public records exist. We retain all source evidence for validation. Overlapping feeds are not added together.
Freshness and missing data
“Last checked” means our collector successfully fetched the source. A utility report’s receipt time or a dataset’s edit time is shown separately when available. A new fetch cannot make an old source timestamp current. Failed or incomplete collection preserves the last good snapshot. Delayed values are separated from fresh totals.
No public county records can mean missing coverage or missing publication. It does not establish zero outages. A utility reporting inventory entry also does not establish complete public access to that utility’s county data.
Geographic precision
County numbers remain county numbers. A point may locate the electrical problem rather than every affected meter. Some California incidents have missing or cross-county geography, so county sums can differ from utility totals. City and ZIP searches navigate to the county containing their Census center. Census ZIP Code Tabulation Areas are approximations of postal ZIP geography.
Restoration and planned interruptions
Restoration times come from utilities and remain estimates. Unknown times stay unknown. When an estimate passes, we label it overdue. When a stable incident’s estimate changes, we preserve the revision. Planned records are labeled separately, and future planned work is excluded from currently affected totals.
History
Charts describe observations collected since this service started. Missing intervals remain gaps. Lower totals indicate a net reduction in reported affected accounts; they do not establish that a particular household’s power returned. Detailed observations are retained for 14 days, followed by daily peak summaries.
Reference data and sources
Census provides county boundaries, place centers, and ZIP-area centers. EIA-861 provides the annual distribution-utility inventory and service-county associations. Customer baselines are kept by utility, state, and service type. We do not infer county account denominators from population.
The live sources are DOE/ORNL ODIN, California Office of Emergency Services, and the National Weather Service. Source documentation and collection status are available on the coverage page.
Privacy
We use Google Analytics to understand site visits and how pages are used. It uses cookies and sends usage data to Google. Read how Google uses information from sites that use its services. “Find outages near me” asks your browser for device location only when you choose it and grant permission. It opens the county containing that position; it does not confirm an individual address. This feature requires HTTPS and does not estimate your location from your IP address. You can also search by city, county or ZIP code. Search requests can appear in local server access logs. The site does not collect utility account credentials or confirm individual addresses.
Source data retains its issuer’s attribution, reuse and retention conditions.