Power cuts hit more than seven times a normal day as Storm Austen crossed: what our data shows

Power cuts: more than seven times a calm day

Our outage ledger records every power cut the networks list. To compare like with like, we count only the four that we have read since 29 September: National Grid, SSEN, UK Power Networks and Northern Powergrid. Between 29 September and 17 October, a calm stretch, those four listed a median of 232 new unplanned cuts a day. The busiest calm day had 360.

On Friday 23 October they listed 1,766. That is more than seven times the calm median, and almost five times the busiest calm day.

The week was already busier than usual before Austen arrived: 349 new cuts on Tuesday, 416 on Wednesday and 323 on Thursday. So not every cut on Friday was the storm's. But Friday stands well clear of all of them. The live picture is on our power-cuts tracker.

Where it hit hardest

National Grid (the Midlands, South West England and South Wales) listed 929 new unplanned cuts on Friday, against a calm-day median of 89: about ten times normal.

SSEN (central southern England and the north of Scotland) listed 430, against 55. UK Power Networks (London, the South East and the East of England) listed 324, against 42. Both were nearly eight times normal.

Northern Powergrid (the North East and Yorkshire) listed 83, against 42: about twice normal, the smallest rise of the four.

At our busiest reading, at 2:50pm on Friday, 74,169 homes were off across the six networks we read (SP Energy Networks doesn't publish home numbers). National Grid accounted for 42,986 of them, UK Power Networks 13,258 and SSEN 12,434. By council area, Cornwall (28,807 homes across 40 cuts) and Somerset (18,327 homes across 45 cuts) were hit hardest, then Tonbridge and Malling, Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells in Kent. A cut that reached several councils counts in each. The full breakdown is on our Storm Austen page.

Homes off fell through Friday night

By 10:24pm on Friday, the number of homes off had fallen to 40,325. At 1:55pm on Saturday it was 20,124, about 12,700 of them on National Grid's network. That figure covers power cuts of any cause, and Storm Boelo's warnings came into force in the north on Saturday, so not all of it is Austen.

For comparison, late on Thursday night (around midnight) our reading showed 4,489 homes off. At least one Austen cut was still off 24 hours after it began (see our Storm Austen page).

The gusts: strong, but not record-breaking

The Met Office's own figures for midnight to midday on Friday put the strongest gust at 76mph, at St Mary's Airport on the Isles of Scilly. The Isle of Portland in Dorset and the Needles Old Battery on the Isle of Wight both recorded 75mph, and Aberporth in west Wales 74mph. Culdrose in Cornwall had 71mph and Aberdaron in Gwynedd 70mph. Langdon Bay in Kent had 56mph.

The Met Office notes these are well below the UK's October record, 124mph at Rhoose in the Vale of Glamorgan on 28 October 1989. The amber warning, for Cornwall, the Isles of Scilly and west Devon, ran from 3am to 10am on Friday. Our wind warning guide has how the warnings developed through the week.

Rain and floods: modest

Austen was mainly a wind storm. On the Environment Agency's gauges in England, the heaviest 15-minute rainfall we recorded during the storm was 16.7mm. Three flood warnings were in force in England at the peak, and there were no severe flood warnings at any of our readings on Friday. Our rainfall tracker shows the gauges now.

What it did for the grid: wind made 42% of the power

Across Friday, wind turbines produced 42% of Britain's electricity on average, according to NESO's Carbon Intensity API. The share moved a lot through the day: it was lowest, 27.8%, in the half hour from 1pm, and highest, 62.1%, in the half hour from 11pm. Imports, nuclear and gas made up most of the rest.

If your power was off a long time

In Great Britain, power-cut payments are automatic: the network pays you, and you don't have to claim. For an ordinary fault the first payment is due after 12 hours off, or after 24 hours if the fault cut off 5,000 or more homes and businesses. When the weather causes many times a network's normal number of high-voltage faults in a day, storm rules apply instead, and the first payment comes after 24 or 48 hours. Our counts cover all cuts, not just high-voltage faults, so we can't say which rule each network will use; that is the network's call.

Our power-cut compensation calculator shows the rules and the amounts for 2026/27.