'Exciting' or 'Frustrating'? - East coast locals and tourists react to record snow

At least 40 million people are under a blizzard warning and more than 600,000 homes and business are without power due to the storm.

The National Weather Service warned that the storm, with steady winds of 25 to 35 mph, would 'make travel dangerous, if not impossible. Scattered downed tree limbs and power outages are possible due to snow load and strong winds.' More than half a million homes and businesses were in the dark in the Northeast as of midday Monday, according to PowerOutage.us, with the bulk of them in Massachusetts and New Jersey.

More than 600,000 customers across the East Coast lost electricity as a powerful blizzard brought heavy snow and damaging winds from the Mid-Atlantic to New England, according to the real-time tracking site PowerOutage.us. The outage map showed 649,469 customers without power in the Northeast Monday a time of writing, with the highest concentrations in Massachusetts and New Jersey as the storm intensified.

Blizzard warnings remain in effect across much of the region. By mid-morning Monday, more than 577,000 customers from Boston to Washington, D.C. were without power, according to outage tracking data — and the number continued climbing as heavy snow and fierce winds persisted.

Customers without power in Massachusetts: Hundreds of thousands without power as blizzard batters Massachusetts.

A massive winter storm has effectively brought life to a standstill across the Northeast, burying major metropolitan areas under heavy snow and whipping the coast with hurricane-force wind gusts. The system, which underwent a period of rapid intensification known as “bombogenesis,” has officially met the criteria for a bomb cyclone, with its central pressure dropping 40 millibars in just 24 hours—a rate of strengthening rarely seen outside of major hurricanes.