Lights flickered back to life in Spain and Portugal on Tuesday after a massive blackout hit the Iberian peninsula stranding passengers in trains and hundreds of elevators while millions saw phone and internet coverage die.
Electricity had been restored to more than 90 per cent of mainland Spain early on Tuesday, the REE power operator said. Lights came on again in Madrid and in Portugal’s capital.
Barely a corner of the peninsula, which has a joint population of almost 60 million people, escaped the blackout. But no firm cause for the shutdown has yet emerged, though wild rumours spread on messaging networks about cyber attacks.
Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro said the source of the outage was “probably in Spain”. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said “all the potential causes” were being analysed and warned the public “not to speculate” because of the risk of “misinformation”.
Sanchez said about 15,000 megawatts of electricity, more than half of the power being consumed at the time, “suddenly disappeared” in about five seconds.
He was unable to say when power would be completely restored in Spain and warned that some workers would have to stay home on Tuesday. Montenegro said Portugal’s power would be back “within hours”.
Power was restored overnight to around 6.2m households in Portugal out of 6.5m, according to the national electricity grid operator.
The outage rippled briefly into southwest France while Morocco saw disruption to some internet providers and airport check-in systems.
People were “stunned”, according to Carlos Candori, a 19-year-old construction worker who had to exit the paralysed Madrid metro system. “This has never happened in Spain”.
“There’s no (phone) coverage, I can’t call my family, my parents, nothing: I can’t even go to work,” he told AFP.
wrote on X.
Railway stations in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Valencia, Seville and four other major cities were kept open all night so that stranded passengers could sleep there.
Spain’s nuclear power plants automatically went offline as a safety precaution, with diesel generators maintaining them in a “safe condition”, the Spanish Nuclear Safety Council said.
said on X: “There are no indications of any cyberattack”.
The huge power cut disrupted flights to and from Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon, European air traffic organisation Eurocontrol said.
Sri Lanka in August 2020, and Argentina and Uruguay in June 2019. In July 2012, India experienced a vast blackout.
In Europe, in November 2006, 10m people were left without power for an hour in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain. That was caused by a failure in Germany’s grid.
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