Thousands lose power on Austin's hottest day of the year

AUSTIN, Texas - Thousands of Austin residents lost power Wednesday evening.

On August 21, there was an Austin Energy outage that impacted about 8,000 East Austin customers starting around 5 p.m.

A spokesperson with Austin Energy said that one of its substations had issues. They are still investigating what caused the substation to cut power to thousands of residents.

Austin Energy reported that all power was turned back on just before 9 p.m.

As hot as it was Wednesday, some Austin residents are just glad it didn’t happen earlier in the day when temperatures rose more than 100 degrees.

"Thankfully, you know it's at this time of night, so it seems to be cooling down but definitely not a comfortable temperature to be at like, for you know, an extended period," said Logan Gomez, an Austin resident.

Other residents said the outage was an inconvenience because it forced them to reschedule plans.

"It's also very frustrating because the estimated time that they said they were going to restore the energy was like around 6:30, and it's very much past that, so like I said earlier it's a big inconvenience for everyone, and I think it makes things hard to do day to day when it's so hot," said Juliana Ariano, another Austin resident.

Austin Energy said it worked with Austin Emergency Management to set up cooling shelters at Parque Zaragoza Recreation Center and Pan AM Recreation Center until 11 p.m.