This work presents an analysis of telecommunications outages in the US due to power loss, based on carrier reports submitted to the Federal Communications Commission. This analysis covers the outages due to power loss over an eight year period (1996 through 2003). Data collected from the reports included variables such as the date, time and duration of the outage and customers affected. A major conclusion is that the number of telecommunication power outages after the Sep 11/01 attack decreased. In addition, analysis strongly suggests that this reliability growth can be attributed to the telecommunication industry, rather than the power industry. The outage causes were categorized based on the trigger and root causes, in addition to identifying the component that is most closely associated with the root cause. The analysis indicates that many of the outages were caused by operations failures, or human errors. Outages also occurred due to either alarm system failure or insufficient response to the generated alarms. The analysis also indicates that many outages are due to violation of Network Reliability and Interoperability Council (NRIC) best practices, suggesting that the power outages can be further reduced if those best practices are implemented.