Power Outage Hits 700-plus Georgia Power Customers in Cumming

Ken Stanford of WGTJRadio reported that more than 700 Georgia Power customers lost power on Market Place Boulevard Saturday morning, April 11, 2026, leaving shoppers, restaurant workers and small-business operators confronting dark storefronts and delayed openings at the start of the weekend. The outage centered on the Cumming Marketplace retail corridor, a concentrated cluster of big-box stores and services that draws substantial Saturday foot traffic.

A Georgia Power statement relayed in local coverage said, “A power outage is impacting multiple businesses on Market Place Boulevard in Cumming, GA, as of Saturday morning, April 11, 2026, with reports of a power loss at the Target store.” Georgia Power crews were reported to be working to restore service as coverage of the event circulated in Forsyth County news outlets.

The outage affected a corridor that includes large retailers with confirmed local listings: Target at 1525 Market Place Blvd, Cumming; Walmart Supercenter at 1500 Market Place Blvd, Cumming; BJ’s Wholesale Club at 1725 Market Pl Blvd, Cumming; and Best Buy at 2085 Market Place Blvd, Cumming. Media reporting singled out the Target location for a reported loss of power during the April 11 event, and the clustered layout of the Cumming Marketplace and adjacent big-box stores magnified the outage’s commercial footprint.

The economic consequences were immediate and specific to the retail mix on Market Place Boulevard: with more than 700 customers affected, stores risked temporary closure, interrupted pharmacy services and spoilage of refrigerated and deli inventory. Point-of-sale systems and card machines that many small businesses rely on can fail during outages, which delays pickups and deliveries and reduces Saturday sales across multiple tenants in the shopping center.

For customers seeking live updates, Georgia Power’s outage map and its Outages and Storm Center are the utility’s official tools for tracking affected-customer counts and restoration progress; independent aggregators such as PowerOutage.us and the USA Today Off the Grid county tracker provide supplementary county-level context. Local coverage noted that, as of the reports published April 11, corporate statements from Target, Walmart, BJ’s and Best Buy, as well as advisories from the City of Cumming or Forsyth County emergency management, had not been published.

This incident echoes a prior disruption in the corridor: a widely reported 2012 outage forced a Cumming Walmart on Market Place Boulevard to close for several hours, demonstrating a recurring vulnerability when a single outage affects multiple essential retail services. The April 11 outage underscored how a concentrated retail district can generate outsized economic and public-safety effects from a single utility interruption until Georgia Power confirms a final customer count and restoration timeline.