As Hurricane Beryl hit Southeast Texas, millions of Houston residents were left without power. Unfortunately, the tracker for the city’s main energy provider was experiencing technical issues, leaving residents in the dark about the status of power outages. That’s when Bryan Norton, a 55-year-old tech worker and podcast host, found an unlikely solution: the Whataburger app.

Whataburger, a popular fast-food chain with a massive presence across Houston, has an app that shows where its restaurants are still open. Norton realized that the app could be used to gauge where power in the city was still on or had been restored. His discovery went viral after he posted about it on social media, where thousands credited him with helping them find out if their loved ones had power or how they could escape the sweltering heat as temperatures and humidity levels soared.

“The fact that Whataburger’s app is giving us that bit of hope — well, it doesn’t get more Texas than that,” Norton told The Washington Post.

Norton’s eureka moment happened during a late-night hunt for food. His home in Tomball, Tex. lost power around 7 a.m. on Monday as Beryl made landfall as a Category 1 storm, toppling transmission lines and knocking down trees. His backup generator soon whirred to life, illuminating the house and kick-starting a fridge holding the barbecue enthusiast’s many pounds of meat. The internet, however, went down that afternoon.

Though he and his wife had planned to hunker down for a few days, Norton said they didn’t want to go “completely stir crazy.” That night, they decided to check for open restaurants — a search that led Norton to a restaurant chain that “tastes like my childhood memories,” he said.

He downloaded the Whataburger app, where the one restaurant in Tomball appeared open, making Norton a little skeptical. That’s why he widened his search to the whole Houston area — and soon saw a patchwork of gray and orange Ws, where the latter logos marked the open Whataburgers.

“You could see like this whole wave of gray and a couple of orange, and they changed little by little,” Norton said. “I was like, ‘Holy cow! Now we can see the scope of the issue.’ Obviously, it’s not a perfect tool, but it’s pretty solid.”

After Norton posted about it on social media, it quickly spread on neighborhood pages and family group chats. Users found that an open Whataburger signaled that nearby gas stations or stores might also have power — a useful tracking service at a time when utility company CenterPoint Energy’s power-restoration map was down.

As of Wednesday night, CenterPoint’s website shows power has been restored to over a million customers, down from a peak of some 2.26 million on Monday. About 40 percent of Whataburger’s 165 locations across the Houston area are open.

A CenterPoint spokesperson said in a statement to The Post that its outage map has been unavailable since a destructive storm in May led to “technical challenges” as customers flooded the site. There are plans to replace the map with a “redesigned cloud-based platform” by the end of July, the spokesperson added.

“We recognize the inconvenience to our customers and will continue providing updated outage information,” the statement adds.

The scale of the outages and lack of a tracking map has frustrated residents in the nation’s fourth-largest city. For Carliss Chatman, a business law professor at Southern Methodist University, the issue has raised questions about Houston’s preparedness.

“I can start my car from my phone anywhere in the world, but CenterPoint can’t tell me where power is out?” Chatman said. “Like, you’re telling me a burger place has better information about outages than a utility company?”

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Read the original article by María Luisa Paúl on The Washington Post to learn more about how Whataburger’s app became a power outage tracker during Hurricane Beryl.