How we detect outages

The rules

Power from the news

We read the RSS feeds of major news sites in each country and ask GDELT for new articles every 15 minutes. We store only the headline, link, outlet and time, never the article text.

A headline counts when it contains a word from our list, such as “power outage”, “Stromausfall” or “panne de courant”. Words like “drill”, “electricity price” or “vote” rule it out again.

We find the place using a gazetteer: the longest place name in the headline wins. If a name is ambiguous, we pick the larger town or the outlet's home region.

From suspected to confirmed

One article makes a possible outage. It becomes a confirmed outage when at least two independent outlets report on the same region within three hours, or when the grid operator reports it.

When a source says power is back, the region shows “Resolved”. If nothing new arrives for six hours, we show “Probably resolved”. That is our assumption; nobody has given the all-clear.

Power from grid operators

Where a grid operator publishes its outages openly, we read them directly. Such a report counts as confirmed straight away.

Internet and phone

We read the status pages of major providers and the measurement signals from IODA (Georgia Tech). IODA signals also fire without a real outage, so on their own they only count as suspected.

Websites

We load every listed address every 5 minutes and wait 10 seconds at most. If it does not answer, we check again 10 seconds later. Only when that fails too do we show “Down”. It goes back to “Up” after three good checks in a row.

When we don't know

If a region has no source, it shows “No live data”. If the last fetch is too old, it shows “Data out of date”. We only show a green “No outage reported” when a source actually answered.

Open API

All data on this site is available as JSON, no key required. Responses are cached for up to 60 seconds.

Endpoints

• /monitoring/api/v1/summary.json
• /monitoring/api/v1/country/{cc}.json
• /monitoring/api/v1/region/{code}.json
• /monitoring/api/v1/website/{id}.json
• /monitoring/api/v1/search?q=&typ=strom|netz|website
• /monitoring/api/v1/status.json
• /monitoring/api/v1/map/power.json
• /monitoring/api/v1/map/network.json
• OpenAPI 3.1

Disclaimer

zerolog Monitoring is not an official warning service. The information comes from automatically read sources and can be wrong, incomplete or late. We give no guarantee. In an emergency, contact the responsible authorities, such as the police or your grid operator.