How Storm Austen unfolded
Storm Austen was named by the Met Office early in the week, with an Amber wind warning in force from first thing on Friday for Cornwall, Devon, the Isles of Scilly and Plymouth. Power cuts began in the South West within hours and spread through the day, eventually reaching 104 postcode areas across England -- as far as Surrey, Kent and Oxfordshire -- well beyond where the warning itself applied.
At its peak, around 5pm on Friday, our tracker recorded 866 active unplanned power cuts nationwide, affecting an estimated 33,650 homes and businesses. The Amber warning itself expired on Friday, but restoration work continued for days afterwards as crews worked through the backlog, overlapping with Storm Boelo's own outages further north.
How Storm Boelo unfolded
Storm Boelo, the season's second named storm, brought its own Amber wind warning for northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland from Saturday evening to Sunday evening, with forecast gusts of 70-80mph on exposed coasts. Power cuts built steadily across the warning area as the storm tracked eastward, affecting 114 postcode areas at its height -- Belfast, Inverness, Bradford and York among the hardest hit.
At its peak, around midday on Sunday, our tracker recorded 2,055 active unplanned power cuts, affecting an estimated 90,487 homes and businesses -- arriving while Storm Austen's own outages were still being restored in the south, so for part of the weekend both storms' outages were live on our map at once. The single highest combined customer total across both storms came a few hours later, Sunday afternoon: 104,882 customers without power at once.
The total toll
The peak figures above only capture a single worst moment, so they understate what a multi-day storm really costs -- new power cuts kept happening for days, as one area recovered and another was hit. Add up every power cut over the whole period instead, and Storm Austen affected an estimated 322,767 customers in total, Storm Boelo 854,988 -- a combined 1,177,755 customers hit by a power cut across the two storms.
That combined figure is a floor, not an exact count, for two reasons. About 1 in 6 power cuts over the period (1,457 of 8,322) never had a customer count published by the operator at all, and those aren't included -- the real toll was higher still. And it counts power cuts, not people: if the same home or business lost power twice, once restored and then hit again by a separate fault later in the storm, it's counted both times, since operators report how many customers each fault affected, not who those customers were.
Areas hit hardest
Looking across the whole Friday-to-Monday period, a handful of areas stood out for how many customers were affected at once, not just briefly:
- Belfast (BT) -- ~17,163 customers affected at peak
- Croydon (CR) -- ~10,947 customers affected at peak
- Inverness (IV) -- ~10,649 customers affected at peak
- Bradford (BD) -- ~9,901 customers affected at peak
- Truro (TR) -- ~7,673 customers affected at peak
- York (YO) -- ~7,473 customers affected at peak
- Huddersfield (HD) -- ~6,398 customers affected at peak
- Durham (DH) -- ~6,017 customers affected at peak
- Ipswich (IP) -- ~5,549 customers affected at peak
- Guildford (GU) -- ~5,051 customers affected at peak
Confirmed by customers: the "I'm affected" reports
Every live power cut page on outages.uk lets a customer confirm they're personally affected with one tap, separate from and in addition to whatever the operator itself reports. Across both storms, customers used this to confirm 552 reports on 332 separate incidents -- Storm Austen's outages accounted for 84 of those, Storm Boelo's for 468. These are a direct, if partial, signal of real impact from the people experiencing it, independent of the restoration estimates operators publish.
Where things stand now
As of publication, 682 unplanned power cuts remain active nationwide -- the tail end of both storms' restoration work. You can check live status for any part of the country on our postcode-area pages, or search a specific postcode on the homepage.
What to do if you're affected
If your power is off and you haven't already reported it, call 105 free, any time, to be connected to your local network operator -- this works from any phone, on any network, even if you don't know who your electricity distributor is. Restoration times given by operators are each network's own estimate, not a guarantee.