PG&E Website Crashes Just as Two Million Californians Lose Power

(Bloomberg) -- More than 2 million people are being plunged into darkness as part of an unprecedented, orchestrated blackout across Northern California. But good luck finding out whether you’re one of them.

The website utility giant PG&E Corp. set up for customers to check whether they’re among those losing service has been crashing since yesterday after being inundated with visitors. As of Wednesday morning, the site was still down, delivering instead a message: “YourAccount is temporarily unavailable.”

The company has resorted to posting screen shots of maps of affected areas on Twitter. Individual cities including Oakland have also posted their own maps. But residents were reporting Wednesday morning that city maps showed them at risk of losing power while the utility was assuring them they were not.

For more on the blackout, read this.

To contact the reporter on this story: Lynn Doan in San Francisco at ldoan6@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lynn Doan at ldoan6@bloomberg.net, Joe Richter

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