Massive Power Outage In San Francisco Leaves 100,000+ In the Dark, Disrupts Muni and BART
Dec 20, 2025
A widespread power outage was impacting legions of San Francisco residents and businesses Saturday, and it has seemed to be a cascading situation that began just before 10 am.A reported 65,000 PGE customers — which equates to somewhere north of 100,000 residents and business owners, if not 200,000
— were out of power as of Saturday afternoon, with few updates available from the utility about when the power may be restored.As PGE tells the Chronicle, the trouble began with an outage reported at 9:40 am that was initially just impacting around 14,600 customers in the Inner Sunset, Forest Hill, and neighborhoods around there. Sections of the Richmond and Presidio followed, along with a section of Market Street, around 10:10 am, with around 25,000 customers impacted.As 0f 3 pm, the Outer Sunset was also impacted, along with parts of Hayes Valley, Alamo Square, and the Mission District, and BART and Muni trains were bypassing Van Ness, Civic Center, and Powell stations due to the outage.The outage was impacting traffic signals in multiple parts of the city.As of 4 pm, some neighborhoods were seeing power restored.This makes for some pretty sour grapes for small business owners, especially, on one of the last major shopping days before Christmas, during a season when some businesses make a significant portion of their annual revenue.PGE has not provided any cause for the outage.This is a developing story.
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