This is a list of notable wide-scale power outages. To be included, the power outage must conform to all of the following criteria: The outage must not be planned by the service provider. The outage must affect at least 1,000 people and last at least one hour. There must be at least 1,000,000 person-hours of disruption.
Definition of decimate for English Language Learners. : 1  to destroy a large number of (plants, animals, people, etc.) : 2  to severely damage or destroy a large part of (something)
The earliest English sense of decimate is to select by lot and execute every tenth soldier of (a unit).'' The extended sense destroy a great number or proportion of '' developed in the 19th century:Cholera decimated the urban population.Because the etymological sense of one-tenth remains to some extent, decimate is not ordinarily used with exact ...