Spain and Portugal crippled by widespread blackout

Power went out across all of Spain and Portugal on Monday, cutting cellphone and internet networks, halting trains and trapping people in elevators, officials said.

Spain’s government was scrambling to identify the origin of the huge outage, with Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez going to the headquarters of the state electricity network operator to be briefed.

The operator, Red Electrica, said it would likely take six to 10 hours to restore power in the country and urged people not to speculate as to the cause of the outage.

Plunged into darkness

Images posted on social media showed metro stations plunged into darkness, with trains halted, and people in offices and hallways using the light on their phones to see.

The national road authority DGT told motorists to stop driving, because stop lights were out, forcing vehicles to slow to avoid collisions and police officers to direct traffic at intersections.

AFP journalists in Madrid and Barcelona saw  people coming out into the streets, holding their smartphones up to try to connect to a network.

People were also trapped in lifts, Spanish media reported.

The internet activity monitoring site Netblocks told AFP the blackout caused a “loss of much of the country’s digital infrastructure”. It said web connections plunged to just 17 percent of normal usage.

Flights delayed

Portugal’s REN operator said in a statement to AFP that all the Iberian peninsula was affected by the blackout, adding that the outage occurred around midday.

There was also a brief blackout in southwest France, that country’s electricity operator said, but power was now restored.

“An electrical incident is currently affecting Spain and Portugal, the cause of which remains to be determined,” France’s high-voltage grid operator RTE said.

The European Commission was in contact with Spain and Portugal “to understand the underlying cause” of the outage, a spokesperson said.

Spain’s railway operator Adif said that the power cut halted trains across the entire country;

Airports operator Aena said there were flight delays, but the country’s airports were still operational thanks to “contingency electricity systems”.

Spain’s Red Electrica said it had managed to start restoring power in the north and south of the country but the problem was not yet resolved.

“We are continuing to work to bring back power,” it said.

Spain’s El Pais newspaper posted photos on its website of stopped metro trains in Madrid, police directing traffic, and its own reporters working in a darkened office by the torchlight.

It also reported that hospitals’ core departments were able to keep functioning because of back-up generators, even if some other units were left without power.

Massive blackouts have affected other countries around the world in recent years.

Huge outages struck Tunisia in September 2023, Sri Lanka in August 2020, and Argentina and Uruguay in June 2019. In July 2012, India experience a vast blackout.

In Europe, in November 2006, 10 million 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.

Do you draw any comfort from ‘seeing’ other countries also suffering blackouts?

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By Garrin Lambley © Agence France-Presse