Major blackout across Spain and Portugal takes countries offline
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The news: Most of Spain and all of Portugal are experiencing a major blackout, with public transport, traffic lights, telecoms networks and airports all without power, bringing the European nations to a standstill.
The context: Local authorities are racing to understand what prompted the power to stop, with the head of Spain’s electricity grid warning that restoring power could take up to 10 hours. Speaking at a news conference, Red Electrica CEO Eduardo Prieto told reporters that the operation to solve the issue could take "between six and ten hours".
Red Electrica showed power demand plummet just after midday on Monday, dropping more than 10 gigawatts, more than a third of the country’s total electricity usage for the day. The sudden outage caught out millions of people.
Mayor of Madrid José Luis Martínez-Almeida warned residents to stay where they are, and the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's office said: "The government is working to identify the origin of this incident and dedicating all possible resources to resolve it as quickly as possible"
France said it is ready to assist with restoring power to Spain.
Initial investigations into the cause of the outages suggest a technical fault rather than a cyberattack, according to the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA). “For the moment the investigation seems to point out to a technical/cable issue,” a spokesperson told Bloomberg. “Nevertheless, ENISA is closely monitoring the situation and we are in contact with the relevant authorities at national and EU level.”
