Power Outages Around the World

Each country organizes its grid differently, so the way to check an outage changes at the border. A power cut in Manchester goes to a network operator on 105, a hydro outage in Toronto to the local distributor, and load shedding in Johannesburg is announced by Eskom. Choose a country for the official maps, phone numbers and history for each region.

AustraliaPower outages across 8 states and territories16 distributors listed CanadaPower outages across 13 provinces and territories37 utilities listed IrelandPower cuts across 4 provinces1 network operator listed New ZealandPower outages across 16 regions29 lines companies listed South AfricaLoad shedding and power outages across 9 provinces15 electricity distributors listed United KingdomPower cuts across 12 nations and regions7 network operators listed · live count United StatesPower outages across 50 states and DCCounty maps · live count

How each country handles outages

The word for it, who fixes it and who to call in an emergency

Country	Local term	Who repairs faults	Emergency	Time without power per customer
Australia	Power outage	Distributor	000	—
Canada	Power outage	Utility	911	10 hr 5 min (2023)
Ireland	Power cut	Network operator	112 or 999	2 hr 12 min (2025)
New Zealand	Power outage	Lines company	111	4 hr 1 min (2025)
South Africa	Load shedding, power outage	Electricity distributor	112	34 hr 55 min (2025)
United Kingdom	Power cut	Network operator	999	35 min (2025)

Reliability figures aren't comparable between countries, because each regulator treats major storms differently. Open a country to see exactly what its figure includes, or read our global reliability report.

Why only these countries?

We add a country only when we can verify its official outage contacts, reliability data and past events from primary sources. A page for every country on Earth would be easy to generate and much less useful, so we're expanding one country at a time.

Live counts are rarer than you might expect. Most countries have no open outage feed, so where we can't show a real number we say so and send you to the official map. The methodology page lists our sources and licences for each country.