Global outage evidence — methods and coverage

Reviewed 1 November 2026. Open Watchtower → Outages for power, internet/network and banking/payment records, alongside the existing satellite, solar and infrastructure context.

What the map represents

This is a curated public-source observatory, not a census of every outage in the world. An empty area, a zero in a monitored selection, or an unavailable feed does not establish normal service. Provider API/component incidents do not necessarily affect every customer, a whole bank, a whole carrier or a national network. Nothing here measures bank solvency.

Power sources include UK Power Networks, National Grid Electricity Distribution, BC Hydro, Cal OES, Maryland iMAP, Glitre Nett, Energex via Brisbane City Council and Rochester Public Utilities. Their local service areas differ. IODA adds country-level routing/probing intervals; these are measurements, not independent confirmation of causes, nationwide blackouts or restoration. Banking/payment and cloud/network sources retain their published service scope. Restricted, commercial and credentialed references remain visibly inactive.

Evidence and location

• Utility/provider incidents, authority-compiled reports, component states, provider notices, instrument intervals, news reports, planned work and resolved records remain separate.
• Direct-publisher reports are conservative multilingual phrase matches in the retained news corpus. Matching is incomplete and may be wrong; read the original source. Publisher location never becomes incident location.
• Source point/area geometry, country or metro reference points, and unknown geography retain different labels. Country markers identify references, not national impact. Unlocated events stay searchable in the list, without headquarters pins.
• Household/street/customer/crew/priority-service information is omitted. Small-count utility points are rounded to approximately5km. County polygons are reporting boundaries, not claims that the entire county is affected.
• Customers/meters/accounts are not people. Confirmed-off, predicted-off and restored counts remain separate. Overlapping categories, provider components and authority/utility reports must not be summed into a worldwide total.

Time, status and limits

Source start, update/publication, estimate, publisher-snapshot, collection and check clocks remain distinct. Unspecified-timezone operator timestamps are retained verbatim. A fresh HTTP response cannot make an expired publisher snapshot current. Missing/failed sources retain dated records and visible gaps. Restoration is not inferred from disappearance, elapsed duration or an estimate.

Collection uses a bounded background queue, generally every5minutes (selected satellite sources every15minutes). A refresh reads the available snapshot; it does not bypass provider pauses. Access denials and rate limits back off. Response, cache, geometry and row limits prevent unbounded ingestion. At most5000rows/4MiB per source,20000records/24MiB per admitted view; source-store32MiB, document cache12MiB, bounded snapshot cache. Source omissions/truncation are explicit. IODA's seven-day query is capped at500source intervals. The retained publisher collection is scanned at most50000items per cycle; this is not every article worldwide.

Using the map

Select Power/grid, Internet+networks or Banking/payments. Use country-reference, evidence, timeframe, location and maintenance/recovered/stale filters. Select a record for original source, geometry basis, clocks and reported customer units. Coverage lists source availability, attribution, metadata and limitations. Export carries the selected records, filters, source inventory and snapshot provenance. Live map geometry is hidden during Replay.

API and normalized data points

/agent/api/outage-world-evidence?view=summary returns six descriptive inventories: power operator/authority records; IODA measurement intervals; network/cloud/telecom provider records; bank/payment provider records; publisher-reported outage records; and source availability. These are not predictive probabilities or unique physical-outage counts. Unknown values are null; partial coverage remains explicit.

Use view=records|record|summary|sources, domain, country, hours=1..168, evidence=all|operator|instrument|report, q, and planned|resolved|stale=0|1. Default record pages have at most1000rows. Continue with the returned native snapshot and page.nextOffset, keeping selection filters unchanged. Tokens expire after5minutes and changed/expired selections return409; restart from the first page. Native pagination is separate from MCP JSON Pointer pagination. view=record&id=... reads one record. Six world-* normalized point definitions expose source counts and availability with explicit units and no calibrated forecast claim.

Source inventory and attribution

The inventory below records configured sources and inactive reference paths, not a claim that every source is currently available. Consult the live Coverage panel for checks and errors. Original source rights and metadata apply; registration does not confer a commercial data licence.