More than 4,200 Duke Energy customers across North Charlotte woke up in the dark early Tuesday morning after power failed along the Old Statesville Road and Gibbon Road area, with outages stretching into the West Sugar Creek Road corridor. The blackout was first reported around 5:30 a.m., right as residents were beginning their morning commute, and Duke Energy's outage map showed 4,224 customers affected.
According to WBTV, the utility's outage map projected restoration between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. The outage was reported across the north Charlotte area near the named roads.
Early-Morning Outage
The timing of the outage placed it before the morning commute in the Old Statesville Road and West Sugar Creek Road corridors. Under North Carolina law, drivers must treat an unpowered traffic signal as a full stop and the intersection as a four-way stop.
The Tricon Residential page identifies a Derita/Statesville area. The outage also extended along Old Statesville Road and nearby corridors.
Part of a Busier Week for Duke Energy's Grid
Tuesday's outage was not an isolated event on Duke Energy's North Carolina system. Just a day earlier, on September 14, the utility dealt with a separate disruption in downtown Pittsboro and Chatham County that left over 2,500 customers without power, as reported by Chapelboro.com. The separate incidents highlight the occurrence of unplanned outages across the state, even when the specific cause of a given blackout remains undetermined.
Charlotte itself is no stranger to large-scale outages this year. Back in April, a much bigger blackout in the University area knocked out power to nearly 30,000 Duke Energy customers, Hoodline previously reported. Tuesday's outage was a fraction of that scale.
Grid Strain and the Push for Modernization
Duke Energy has said its automated self-healing grid technology helped avoid nearly 2.2 million customer outages across its six-state territory in 2025 alone, saving an estimated 5.2 million hours of total outage time, according to a report from Quartz.
On September 14, North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson petitioned state regulators to create a dedicated rate class for high-capacity data centers, arguing that the sector's rapid growth is placing unprecedented strain on the electrical grid, per the North Carolina Department of Justice. Duke Energy has reported contracting 2.7 gigawatts of new data center power load in just the first quarter of 2026.
PowerOutage.us reports 5,529,117 customers tracked statewide, providing broader context for the localized 4,224-customer outage.
WBTV reported that a large tree apparently fell on power lines, offering a likely explanation for Tuesday's outage.
