A huge power failure plunged large areas of Spain and Portugal into darkness on Monday, causing chaos in cities such as Madrid and Lisbon and leaving millions of people without electricity. The massive interruption also paralyzed metro networks, airports, traffic systems, ATM machines as well as emergency calls, and caused confusion as authorities struggled to identify the cause.
The blackout, which hit around 12:15 p.m. local time, led to a steep drop in the overall use of electricity in Spain — from 27,500 megawatts to about 15,000 megawatts, according to official data from Spain’s power grid operator, Red Eléctrica.
Though power started to flow to some parts of the north and south later in the day, the most populous cities remained paralytic for hours. Lights went out, traffic signals flickered, the subway system of Madrid halted and throngs of people flooded into the streets as offices, embassies and public buildings took workers out through available exits. Play was suspended at a match in the Madrid Open tennis tournament as systems in the arena went down.
Emergency measures were also put in place in Spain and Portugal, where emergency cabinet meetings were ordered. French operator RTE said some areas of southern France had seen short outages, adding to evidence of a broader European grid failure.
“This was not a local phenomenon,” a spokesman for Portugal’s REN utility said. “We are in contact with the civil protection authorities and European operators in order to understand to the full extent of the origin of the incident.
Portugal’s government said the disruption may have been due to problems beyond its territory, which may have involved Spain’s energy infrastructure. The Portuguese distributor E-Redes called it “a systemic European grid event,” and said that some regions implemented rolling cuts in power to protect the wider network.
Entire subway systems were closed in Lisbon and Porto. Courts stopped operating, and businesses were unable to use the internet or accept card payments. Mobile networks went down, and emergency responders said multiple people had been trapped in elevators and underground trains.
In Lisbon Airport, backup generators kicked in to keep operations going, however, flights in both Spain and Portugal were delayed. AENA, the Spanish national airport authority, which operates 46 airports, said that services were widely disrupted but that no accidents had been reported as a result of the blackouts.
Some cybersecurity experts have not dismissed the possibility of a malicious cyberattack, but no cause has been determined by the government. A crisis committee in Spain is overseeing the investigation of the outage, one of the biggest to affect the Iberian Peninsula in recent memory.
In the meantime, officials say, recovery has begun, and power should start to stabilize in most areas in the next few hours.