Introduction

Every Australian electricity distributor publishes its outages on its own website, in its own format, and forgets them once they are fixed. The Aussie Outage Tracker API reads all of them — 15 networks across 8 states and territories — and returns them in one normalised shape: what is off right now, and every outage recorded since each network's archive began.

It is the same data behind the live outage map, made available to programs.

What you get

• One outage object for every network. A fault in Cranbourne from AusNet and a planned shutdown in Darwin from Power and Water come back with the same fields, the same status vocabulary and the same cause categories. See Outages.
• Live and archived, in one endpoint. GET/v1/outages with status=active is what is off right now; the same endpoint with from and to searches the archive, up to 31 days at a time.
• History no network keeps. GET/v1/outages/{id}/history returns every change recorded for an outage — each moved restoration estimate, each change in customers off. No distributor publishes this.
• Places. Filter by suburb, postcode, a point and radius, or a bounding box. See Places and attribution.
• Totals. GET/v1/stats/outages counts outages, customers affected and median duration by network, state, cause, day or month.
• Honest gaps. Anything a network does not publish is null, never 0 and never a guess. GET/v1/networks says, per network, how often each field is filled.

Coverage

New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory. Electricity is the only utility published today; the schema already carries utility, so water, gas and telecommunications arrive as new values rather than a new API. Networks and coverage lists every network and what it does and does not publish.

What it is not

• Not a history of anything before recording began. No network publishes its past outages, so the archive starts the day each network was first recorded and cannot be backfilled. Each network's start date is on Networks and coverage.
• Not endorsed by any network. Aussie Outage Tracker is independent. The networks' own words are kept verbatim (status_detail, cause.description, source.reference) so you can quote them to the network.
• Not writable. The API is read-only. There is nothing to create, update or delete.
• Not a push service. There are no webhooks. To follow changes, poll with changed_since — see Keeping a copy in sync.

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