Yeah I actually clocked this at the time and it bugged me. The official line was "unrelated grid issues" but three cities on the same night during a supposedly routine atmospheric event? That's a stretch.
What gets me is the timing windows. I went back and looked at the local news archives for all three and the outages started within about 40 minutes of each other. That's not a coincidence thats a pattern.
I've spent a fair bit of time out in the field tracking Bigfoot evidence and one thing you learn pretty quick is that when multiple unusual things cluster together in time and space, you stop calling it coincidence and start looking for a common variable. Same logic applies here.
Anyone know if there were any anomalous readings from amateur radio operators that night? That tends to be where the good data surfaces before it disappears. Would love to cross-reference the outage zones with the reported flight path too if someone has those coordinates.