Isaias knocked out power to more than 884,000 customers across the Southeast

At 7:38 AM on Saturday, October 10, 2026, the PowerOutage tracking service showed 430,443 customers without electricity in Florida, 326,057 in Alabama and 127,905 in Georgia, a combined total of more than 884,000. That snapshot came about twelve hours after Hurricane Isaias crossed the Gulf Coast, and it is the highest regional figure in the coverage reviewed for this article.

The 7:38 AM count, state by state

That reading was a snapshot, not a running total of everyone who lost service. Customers restored overnight drop out of the count, so the number understates how many households went dark at some point during the storm.

The figures come from the running log in CBS News’ live coverage of Isaias, which attributes its outage numbers to PowerOutage data and was last stamped 10:14 PM EDT on October 10. Its earlier entries trace the climb: more than 697,000 across the three states at 2:08 AM, 834,061 as of 5 AM, and more than 860,000 at 7:30 AM before the 884,000 reading.

The afternoon tally was lower and wider. At 2:21 PM the same log listed Florida at 422,357, Alabama at 200,930 and Georgia at 44,877, plus Mississippi at 18,824, South Carolina at 7,917, North Carolina at 8,138 and Tennessee at 6,649, for a total above 700,000. The storm’s remnants had by then carried outages into four more states, even as Alabama’s count fell by more than a third from the morning.

Two readings taken while this article was prepared were lower again. The tracker’s Florida page showed 117,084 of 173,244 monitored Escambia County customers without power, about 68 percent, and a national page showed roughly 616,000 customers out. Both pages displayed only a relative “updated minutes ago” label, so neither carries a usable clock time; they indicate direction, not a figure that can be dated.

Alabama Power’s cumulative count

Utilities count differently from the tracker. A report carried by WEAR-TV gives Alabama Power’s own numbers as of 11 a.m. on October 10: more than 267,000 customers across the state had lost power at some point during the storm, and more than 130,000 had been restored. The utility said it had more than 6,400 additional personnel supporting its own Storm Team and that crews were working around the clock, but no statewide restoration time had been announced.

The gap between the two measures is real. Alabama Power’s 267,000 is a cumulative count of its own customers; the 326,057 Alabama figure at 7:38 AM is a simultaneous snapshot across every utility in the state, cooperatives included, so the two cannot be subtracted from one another. A separate Fox 10 report published that morning quoted Alabama Power as saying more than 5,000 additional crews were coming from nearly 25 states.

Escambia County and the Pensacola utilities

Escambia County, Florida, took the sharpest local hit. In its 8:30 AM recovery update on October 10, the City of Pensacola said nearly 141,000 of Florida Power & Light’s 168,000 Escambia County customers had lost power, and that about 11,500 had been restored as of 8 a.m. The update said “thousands of linemen” were deployed and gave no restoration timeline.

Power was not the only utility to fail. The Emerald Coast Utilities Authority issued a systemwide precautionary boil-water notice on the night of October 9, relayed in a Fox 10 report and by WFTV. Customers were told to boil tap water for at least one minute before drinking, cooking or brushing teeth. The notice stays in effect until the utility confirms the water is safe, and the City of Pensacola’s update said it remained in place that morning while crews assessed and repaired infrastructure.

Restoration with no completion date

No source read for this article gives a completion date for restoration in any of the affected states: Alabama Power said no statewide estimate had been announced, and the City of Pensacola’s update listed none for FPL’s Escambia County customers. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at 9 a.m. that crews were concentrating on the hardest-hit communities, with nearly 440,000 Florida customers still out at that hour by the state’s reading, and the National Hurricane Center’s forecast for up to 8 inches of rain across southern Alabama, the Panhandle and southwest Georgia raised the odds of further line damage.

The most recent timestamped count in the CBS log is the 2:21 PM entry: more than 700,000 customers out across seven states. The utilities’ own tallies, Alabama Power’s 11 a.m. update and the City of Pensacola’s 8:30 AM report, remain the only restoration figures published with times attached.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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