This is a list of famous wide-scale power outages

• The Northeast Blackout of 1965 on November 9, 1965.
• The New York City Blackout of July 13-14, 1977, resulted in looting and rioting.
• The Great Storm of October 1987 brought down power lines throughout southern England causing extensive blackouts.
• On March 13, 1989, a geomagnetic storm caused the Hydro-Quebec power failure which left 6 million people without power for 9 or more hours.
• The 1998 ice storm in northeastern North America caused prolonged blackouts, particularly in Quebec where many transmission towers were destroyed by ice.
• The 1998 power failures in Auckland, New Zealand.
• During the California electricity crisis there were regular power failures due to energy shortages and market manipulation resulting from failed deregulation.
• On August 14, 2003, there was a wide-area power failure in the northeastern USA and central Canada, affecting 50 million people: see 2003 U.S.-Canada blackout.
• There was a 2003 London blackout on August 28 which won worldwide headlines such as "Power cut cripples London" but in fact only affected 500,000 people.
• On September 23, 2003, a power failure affected 5 million people in Denmark and southern Sweden.
• On September 27-28, 2003, a power failure affected all of Italy except Sardinia, cutting service to more than 56 million people.
• On December 20, 2003, a power failure hit San Francisco, affecting 120,000 people.
• On September 4, 2004, five million people in Florida were without power at one point due to Hurricane Frances, one of the most widespread outages ever due to a hurricane.

The fact that the five blackouts in 2003 occurred in different parts of the world in rapid succession has drawn the attention of governments to power grids' vulnerability to technical failures, and to the possibility of terrorist attacks against them.

See also

• power outage
• blackout