Brown Outs are officially known as Voltage Sags and are a long term (either defined as greater than 1 minute or 3 minutes) power reduction, so called as your normally white glowing incadecent bulb now glows brown.

During a brown out equipment may malfunction as there may not be enough voltage to correctly operate the equipment. Data loss is common as voltage levels fall resulting in processor and write errors.

Brownouts can be caused by a number of factors, including:

• Heavy Loads, collapsing the mains voltage
• Times of Peak Demand
• Deliberate action by the utility to reduce network load