University of Maryland reports campus-wide outage, crews rescue people from elevators

A campus-wide power outage at the University of Maryland in College Park disrupted one of Prince George’s County’s largest institutions and sent crews to rescue people stuck in elevators. The university said Facilities Management staff were on site assessing the situation, and it directed people with mobility impairments or disabilities to call the University of Maryland Police Department at 301-405-3555 for egress assistance or 911 for any life-safety issue.

Students, faculty and staff were first notified around 4 p.m. on Saturday, June 20, 2026, and a second alert at 7:45 p.m. said there was still no estimated time for full repair. University officials said power was expected to come back overnight, but they did not identify the cause of the outage or say how many buildings lost service.

The scale of the disruption matters because the University of Maryland campus covers roughly 1,340 to 1,352 acres, includes about 252 to 263 buildings, and contains more than 14 million square feet of facilities. The university’s Division of Administration is responsible for operations across that footprint, which means a failure in the electrical system can ripple into dining, the health center, residential buildings, security systems and research spaces even when the outage begins on a Saturday.

The university’s own alerts showed those pressures in real time. One message said there were limited services in dining and the health center, underscoring how quickly a power failure can affect daily life on campus. Because College Park is home to tens of thousands of students and a major employment center, an outage of this size also reaches beyond classrooms and into housing, weekend work, and the routines of staff, contractors and visitors who rely on the campus running normally.

The June outage also raised familiar questions about backup systems and continuity planning. The university had faced a similar campuswide outage on August 29, 2025, when limited services in dining and the health center were affected before power was restored to all public locations on campus the next day. Saturday’s incident put the same vulnerabilities back in view, with officials still working through restoration and still not explaining what failed.

By late Saturday, the university said the immediate focus was recovery, not explanation. Crews were moving through the campus, elevators had become part of the emergency response, and the university was left to restore power across a campus that functions as housing, workplace, hospital-adjacent services and research hub all at once.