When a major blackout hit the U.S. and Canada in 2003, more than 50 million people lost power. Today, questions remain about the vulnerability of the power grid.
Late one Thursday afternoon in the summer of 2003, the power suddenly went out. Within minutes, the largest blackout in U.S. history shut down electricity across much of the Northeast, the Midwest and parts of Canada.
In the days and weeks that followed, reporters and investigators worked to figure out what caused the outage. Their findings raised bigger questions about how reliable the power grid was, and whether a system built decades earlier could handle modern demands.
Since then, some improvements have been made. But new risks have also emerged, and demand for electricity has spiked. Today, governments and utility companies are still trying to decide how to protect the power grid and prevent another widespread blackout.
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