Two Hours in the Dark: Austin Airport Restores Power After Terminal Outage Delays Flights
A partial power outage hit the Barbara Jordan Terminal, the main terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, on the evening of Tuesday, Oct. 13. Local stations including FOX 7 Austin, CBS Austin and KXAN all described it as a partial outage rather than a total failure of the airport, and all of them reported delays to flights arriving and departing AUS that night.
Timing accounts differ slightly. FOX 7 Austin said the airport posted about the problem on X and that officials reported the partial outage at the Barbara Jordan Terminal at around 5:50 p.m. CBS Austin, drawing on the Austin Energy outage map, put the start of the electrical problem at roughly 5:18 p.m. — about half an hour before the public notice. Officials initially declined to say how long the outage would last.
The first visible casualties were the check-in desks. According to KXAN, ticket counters for Southwest, United and Delta were down because of the outage, and lights in some baggage claim areas went out as well. Airline staff had to fall back on manual processing while the systems were unavailable, slowing down check-in and bag drop for evening departures.
Airport officials stressed that operations never stopped entirely. The TSA checkpoint stayed open and operational throughout the outage, and baggage claim services continued to function, CBS Austin and KXAN reported. Passengers could still clear security and collect their bags; what actually stalled was check-in and the flight schedule itself.
Repairs ran from late afternoon into the night. KXAN reported that many airport systems, including the airline ticket counters, began coming back online at around 6:40 p.m. CBS Austin said airport crews and Austin Energy crews continued working to fully restore power to the terminal.
FOX 7 Austin and Yahoo News both reported that a little after 8 p.m., officials announced all power had been restored at Austin-Bergstrom. FOX 7 added that the airport had been hit by a partial outage for nearly two hours. Because the interruption was long enough to matter, airlines had to adjust flight schedules for both arriving and departing flights.
No explanation has been offered yet. CBS Austin reported that the cause of the outage remains under investigation, while Austin Energy and airport personnel worked through the evening. As of the latest reports, neither the utility nor the airport had identified the failing equipment or said whether the fault lay in internal systems, external lines or something else.
The disruption showed up as delays rather than cancellations. KXAN and NewsLocker both said flights were delayed Tuesday but that no cancellations were reported, and SpotOn Texas described arriving and departing flights running late through the evening. For scale, the FlightRadar24 page for AUS showed, in a snapshot taken around 8 p.m. local time, 258 delayed flights — 33 percent of the day's schedule — an average delay of 17 minutes and two cancellations. Those are whole-day totals and are not all attributable to the outage.
Travelers booked on Southwest, United and Delta faced the worst of the terminal-side disruption, since those were the counters that went offline. Evening passengers in the checkpoint lines and at baggage claim were largely shielded, since the TSA screening area and bag retrieval kept operating while the rest of the terminal was dark.
The response was a joint effort between Austin Energy, the local electric utility, and airport staff. Early on, FOX 7 Austin carried only the official line that crews were working on the issue, with no estimate of when power would return; that was later updated to a full restoration. Neither side released details about the repair itself.
The airport's advice to travelers was straightforward: check directly with your airline for the latest flight information, or consult the airport's online flight board. FOX 7 Austin similarly urged passengers to keep watching their airlines for updates. With the cause of the outage still unpublished, any ripple effects on tomorrow's schedule will be governed by airline notices rather than by anything the airport has said so far.