The lights keep going out. Here is the official story, and what we think is really going on

Why it feels random

If it seems like the power keeps cutting out in odd places for odd reasons, you are not imagining it. We went back through the last two months, from September 1 to November 4, and pulled together every US outage report we could confirm with a utility, a weather service or a local newsroom. We found 13 separate events, from Alaska to Florida to New England. Add up the customer counts reported for each one and you get roughly 1.6 million outages. A customer is a home or business account, so the number of people who sat in the dark is higher.

Each event came with its own short explanation. Put them side by side and a pattern shows up. Below we list them in order, then lay out the bigger warnings from the people who run and guard the grid, then tell you what we think. We keep the facts and our opinion clearly apart.

Two months of outages, one by one

September 1 to 3, southeast Texas. Tropical Storm Edouard came ashore just over the Louisiana line and knocked out power to more than 82,000 customers in Texas. Entergy said nearly 200 poles and about 80 transformers were damaged.

September 2 and 3, southeast Michigan. Two days of severe storms, including an EF-2 tornado that tore through downtown Detroit, caused close to 300,000 outages, according to the National Weather Service office in Detroit.

September 25, western Washington. A gusty early-fall storm cut power to about 54,000 customers, most of them with Puget Sound Energy around Olympia, Tumwater, Lacey and Centralia.

September 26 to 28, the Northeast. A slow nor'easter knocked down trees and lines from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire, with more than 200,000 outages in all. Connecticut and Rhode Island were hit hardest. A falling tree killed a man in Brooklyn.

September 27, Germantown, Maryland. A transformer fire near Observation Drive left thousands of residents without power for several hours, according to the county fire service.

October 9, the Florida Panhandle and Alabama. Hurricane Isaias, the first hurricane of the season, made landfall near Destin as a Category 2 storm. The Associated Press counted about 800,000 customers in the dark the next day. Alabama Power alone reported more than 267,000 customers affected. Two people were killed by falling trees.

October 9, Cleveland, Texas. Copper thieves broke into an Entergy substation and cut the locks on equipment. About 2,000 customers lost power for roughly an hour, and the utility put the damage at around $100,000.

October 12 and 13, Rochester, Minnesota. A failed piece of insulation at a city substation set off an electrical arc. More than 7,000 customers were out overnight until about 4:30 a.m.

Mid-October, Northern California. PG&E switched off power on purpose to prevent wildfires during a week of strong, dry winds. By October 15 about 87,000 customers in 29 counties were without power.

October 16, Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Southern California Edison did the same as Santa Ana winds blew, leaving close to 70,000 customers dark, including in Malibu and Calabasas.

October 27, Iredell County, North Carolina. An excavator pulled down a Duke Energy transmission line near Troutman, cutting power to about 10,000 customers for nearly three hours.

October 30, Anchorage and the Mat-Su Valley, Alaska. A fierce windstorm dropped trees onto lines, and more than 47,000 customers had lost power by that morning.

November 2, Washington, D.C. About 1,100 Pepco customers in Foggy Bottom lost power after trouble at the I Street Substation. Firefighters were called to smoke coming from several manholes on H Street NW, George Washington University canceled morning classes and traffic lights went dark. Power was back by early afternoon. Pepco said it was still looking into the cause and saw no sign of foul play.

The tally by cause

When we sort those outages by the cause officials gave, weather accounts for by far the most, about 1.48 million, with Isaias alone close to 800,000. Planned wildfire shutoffs in California come next at about 157,000. Equipment failures and accidents account for more than 17,000. Theft accounts for about 2,000. The D.C. event, about 1,100, is still under investigation.

The bigger warnings

The mid-Atlantic near miss. From October 13 to 16 the U.S. Department of Energy used its emergency powers to let PJM, the grid operator serving 13 states and D.C., run extra power plants it would not normally call on. The reason given was unusually warm October weather at the same time many plants were offline for planned maintenance.

The grid's own report card. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the industry's watchdog, said in its 2026 reliability report that traditional power plants broke down unexpectedly more often in 2025. Its measure of forced outages rose to 9.2 percent, up from 7.6 percent a year earlier and above the usual 7 to 8 percent range. Coal plants were the worst, at about 14 percent.

The data center warning. In May, NERC issued a Level 3 alert, its most serious kind, about giant computer loads like AI data centers. These sites can suddenly drop huge amounts of demand off the grid, or swing it up and down, faster than operators can react. NERC counted two such drops of more than 1,000 megawatts in 2025 and found that most utilities did not yet have the procedures to handle these loads.

The cyber warning. In 2024, CISA, the FBI and the NSA said that a Chinese state hacking group known as Volt Typhoon had broken into US infrastructure networks, including energy, and was positioning itself to cause disruption in a crisis. In May 2026, CISA launched a program called CI Fortify telling utilities to plan for attackers already inside their control systems with outside help cut off, and to be ready to keep running on their own for weeks or months.

The physical warning. In December 2022, someone fired rifle rounds into two Duke Energy substations in Moore County, North Carolina, leaving tens of thousands of customers without power for days. Nobody has been charged. A medical examiner later ruled that the death of an 87-year-old woman whose oxygen machine stopped during the blackout was a homicide. Break-ins like the one in Cleveland, Texas, this October are a smaller version of the same weakness: substations sit in fields behind chain-link fences.

What we think is going on

This section is our opinion.

We think the official explanations are mostly true, and that is the problem. A tropical storm. A Category 2 hurricane. A nor'easter. A cracked bit of insulation. An excavator. None of that is mysterious. But a grid that loses 800,000 customers to a Category 2 storm, and nearly 300,000 to two days of thunderstorms, is a grid with very little give. Lines still hang on wooden poles under trees, and much of the equipment is decades old. You do not need a villain to explain a brittle grid. Age, weather and overuse do the job on their own.

We think the wildfire shutoffs say the quiet part out loud. When two of the country's biggest utilities switch off power to more than 150,000 customers on purpose because their own lines might start fires, that tells you how much risk is built into the wires themselves. Darkness has become a safety plan.

We think demand is outrunning the grid. Power plants are breaking down more often while AI data centers plug in at a pace nobody planned for. The watchdog's top-level alert says utilities were not ready for these loads, and the government needed emergency orders to get through a warm week in October. Our bet is that the cost of all the needed upgrades will land on household power bills, which voters told pollsters on Tuesday they are already worried about.

We think the government is quietly preparing for something worse than bad luck. Agencies do not tell utilities to practice running for weeks while cut off from the outside world unless they believe a serious attack is possible. That is not a theory from a message board. It is the stated planning assumption of the federal cyber agency. We are not saying any of these outages were attacks. Pepco said it saw no foul play in D.C., the Texas break-in was a copper theft, and we have seen nothing that says otherwise. We are saying that an old, stretched grid is also an easier target, and the people responsible for defending it seem to know that.

We think "isolated incident" is true and not the whole truth. Each outage gets explained on its own, one at a time, and that is fair for each event. But nobody adds them together for the public. When you do, you get 13 events, around 1.6 million outages and three deaths from falling trees in two months, from a system that fails more often, works harder, faces new kinds of loads and has known adversaries poking at it. That is the story that deserves a public conversation.

What we are not saying

We are not claiming sabotage where officials say there was none. We are not saying a nationwide blackout is coming next week. Most outages in this country are still short, local and fixed within hours by line crews who work hard in bad conditions. Our list covers the events we could confirm; there were surely smaller ones we missed. If we learn that any of these events had a different cause than officials gave, we will report it and correct this piece.

Afterlight opinion: plan as if the power is not guaranteed

Our advice is the same whether the next outage comes from a storm, a worn-out part, a wildfire shutoff, a data center hiccup or something deliberate. The lights going out is not the emergency. Being unready for it is.

Water first. Keep at least a gallon per person per day for several days, more if you can. If your water depends on an electric well pump, plan for that.

Light and power you control. Flashlights, spare batteries, a battery bank for phones, and if you can afford it, a small generator or solar setup used safely outdoors.

Medical gear. If anyone in your home depends on oxygen, a CPAP or anything else that plugs in, talk to your doctor and your utility now about backup power. Many utilities keep a list of medically vulnerable customers.

Food that needs no fridge. Canned and dry food you actually eat, and a way to cook it safely.

Cash. Card readers and ATMs stop when the power does.

Sign up for alerts. If you live in a wildfire area, register for your utility's shutoff warnings so a planned outage does not catch you off guard.

Know your neighbors, but keep your supplies to yourself. Check on the elderly and sick nearby. Do not advertise what you have stored.

Our Field Guide has step-by-step pages on water, food storage and getting through the first 72 hours and beyond. Start there.

What to watch

Whether Pepco publishes a final cause for the I Street Substation failure. Whether federal regulators turn NERC's data center warning into binding rules. Whether the new Congress takes up who pays for grid upgrades. And winter, when ice storms and cold snaps test a stretched grid hardest.