outage

noun

out·​age ˈau̇-tij 

1

: a quantity or bulk of something lost in transportation or storage

2

a

: a failure or interruption in use or functioning

b

: a period of interruption especially of electric current

Examples of outage in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

The Kansas City, Kansas, Board of Public Utilities and Independence Power & Light reported no outages. — Kansas City Star, 14 Oct. 2026

For Schmid, that means continuing to prepare for outages and adding more dates to her generator's record of use. — Brady Halbleib, CBS News, 14 Oct. 2026

The possible outages would affect portions of counties, not entire counties, the utility stressed. — Sacbee.com, 14 Oct. 2026

And when the most recent leap second was added at the end of 2016, customers of cloud computing provider Cloudflare briefly experienced outages or delays after its servers failed to handle the introduction of a leap second properly. — Katie Hunt, CNN Money, 13 Oct. 2026

Word History

First Known Use

1851, in the meaning defined at sense 1