PG&E shut down power. Too many Internet users shut down its website

The power outages are the largest in California’s history, with some 800,000 customers affected. On Tuesday afternoon, as word spread of the imminent outages, people began visiting the PG&E website and reporting on social media that the site wouldn’t load or that they received error messages. Some said they couldn’t access any part of the site; others said they could access the main site but not the maps associated with the shut-off.

Paul Wilson, a San Francisco-based brand consultant, said it was a “nightmare” trying to get information from the website in the hours before the outage. When he was finally able to access the PG&E site, the text on the page directed him to another site, which was inaccessible. He said he finally gave up and found a map and additional information from the San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco was not affected by the outages.

Others lambasted PG&E for not informing people sooner about the outages, and for initially not using social media to publish detailed maps of the affected areas, updating them as conditions changed. The Pleasanton Police Department made light of the situation by creating an exaggerated and incomprehensible map of the outage zones that went viral on social media.

PG&E began the blackouts early Wednesday in advance of dry, windy weather that increases the risk of dangerous wildfires. As the outages were instituted, PG&E posted messages on its website and social media feeds stating that it was experiencing a high volume of traffic to its website and was “working as quickly as possible to restore access.” Later that day, the utility directed consumers to a website set up through geographic information platform ArcGIS.

That, too, was inaccessible to many customers.

On Thursday, Google’s autofill suggestions for users who typed “pge website” included “pge website down” and “pge website not working.”

Californians have expressed fear that the blackouts will harm the sick and elderly, lead to mobile outages and result in millions of dollars in lost business income.

Doherty said late Thursday morning that PG&E had further increased its server capacity beyond the doubling it did before the shut-offs to accommodate the increased traffic.

The utility said about 600,000 customers were without power midday Thursday. While the utility told people their power could be out for as long as five days, Doherty said PG&E has restored power to 127,000 customers.