Spain and Portugal have recovered their electricity supply after a crippling blackout of unknown causes that disrupted daily life for millions.
Telephone, internet, and lights were working again, train services resumed, shops reopened, and workers flocked back to offices on Tuesday, April 29, 2025, following the outage that struck on Monday afternoon and lasted up to 20 hours in some places.
Maria Jesus Cobos managed to drive home through Madrid overnight after a chaotic day that deprived her of light and communications until almost 11:00 pm (2100 GMT).
“That showed that we are very vulnerable, there’s something that isn’t being done well. I had to drive without traffic lights,” she told AFP, but added people have been “very civilised”.
“It shows us that we can get by,” added the 50-year-old lawyer, who remembered meeting people standing by the road with signs showing their intended destination.
No firm cause for the shutdown has yet emerged, though rumours spread on messaging networks about cyberattacks and an unusual “atmospheric phenomenon”.
The operations director of Spanish grid operator REE, Eduardo Prieto, said on Monday there was “a major fluctuation in the power flow, accompanied by a very large loss of production”.
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That “surpassed the reference disruption for which the electric systems are designed and operated” in the European Union, triggering “a disconnection of the peninsular Spanish electric system from the rest of the European system”, which collapsed the Spanish and Portuguese networks, he explained.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has said “all the potential causes” were being analysed and warned the public “not to speculate” because of the risk of “misinformation”.
In Portugal, “all the sub-stations of the national transport network have been re-established” and “we can now affirm that the network has been perfectly stabilised,” a spokesman for national grid operator REN said on Tuesday.
Power cuts also briefly affected areas of southwestern France before service was restored.
Parts of Denmark’s gigantic Arctic territory of Greenland lost phone and internet connections on Monday evening in an outage possibly linked to the incidents on the Iberian Peninsula, operator Tusass said.
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