The problem
When the internet goes down, it is surprisingly hard to answer a simple question: is this a local network issue, or is the power out?
For telecom teams, this matters. Sending trucks is expensive, slow, and often the wrong first move if you do not have good situational awareness. Customers feel the delay, operations waste money, and everyone ends up working from guesses.
How it started
OutageHub began after we were approached to build a lightweight way to verify power outages in an area. The goal was operational: help support and field teams separate “internet is down” from “power is out” quickly, so decisions get made with real information instead of assumptions.
The first prototype
I built an early prototype in Python to prove the concept and map the scope. It worked well enough to show the value immediately, but it also made the real challenge obvious:
If this is going to matter during live outage conditions, it needs to be reliable.
That does not just mean “the site loads.” It means the data model needs to be consistent, the update path needs to hold up, and the UI needs to stay usable when people actually need it.
Turning it into infrastructure
Once the scope was clear, I brought in a few friends and we started turning it into a real system.
- ingestion across multiple sources
- normalization into one consistent model
- reliability under live conditions
- a public map plus an API teams can integrate directly
The hard part is not the map. The hard part is taking messy, incomplete, inconsistent outage information and making it usable in real time.
Validation and real-world conversations
Since then, we have spoken with utilities, charities, and multiple levels of Canadian government to validate usefulness, test accuracy, and understand how this fits into real operations.
A big part of the work is making sure this is not “cool tech.” It needs to be a tool people trust when the situation is messy and high-pressure.
Where it is now
Right now, the focus is reliability and validation. The goal is simple: when outages are happening, the system needs to hold up and stay useful.