Science

Here’s When Power Might Be Back on in San Francisco

The city suffered a massive outage, but things might be back soon. 

Getty Images / Justin Sullivan

On Friday morning, the city of San Francisco lost power in a massive outage that stranded commuters and shut down businesses across several of the city’s busiest districts. New York City and Los Angeles also suffered major outages, but S.F. was the hardest hit, and as of 3:30 p.m. Eastern, much of the city is still without power. However, the local utility company, PG&E, has been working hard to restore service and has provided a few clues as to how close we are to full coverage again.

The outage was mostly likely caused by a fire at one of the PG&E substations in the city. As of 11:47 S.F. time (2:47 p.m. Eastern), PG&E reports that 10,000 customers affected by the outage have had their power restored.

UPDATE 5:37p.m. Eastern

As of about 2:30 Pacific (5:30 Eastern Inverse time), a PG&E spokesperson told Inverse the company expected to restore power to the vast majority of its customers by 5 or 6 p.m. Pacific on Friday. We chatted with a PG&E rep earlier in the afternoon when PG&E was still shooting to have power restored by 1 p.m., but it looks like that estimate has changed. We’ll update this story if we hear any more.

Right now, there’s absolutely no evidence that the power outages in NYC and L.A. were connected to the one in S.F., despite the prevalent conspiracy theories floating around the internet. The NYC outage began with a single malfunction at a central Manhattan subway stop, and has thus far been localized to the transit system. But if you feel like you missed out on the collective misery, you can get a glimpse of it here.