Huge outage brings Spain, Portugal & France to standstill

A huge power outage hit large parts of Spain and Portugal on Monday, paralysing traffic, grounding flights, trapping people in elevators and leaving power operators scrambling to restore power to millions of homes and businesses.

Some hospitals halted routine work and the two countries’ governments convened emergency cabinet meetings, with officials initially saying a possible cyber attack could not be ruled out.

Outages on such a scale are extremely rare in Europe, and the cause could not immediately be established.

Witnesses said power had started returning to the Basque country and Barcelona areas of Spain in the early afternoon, a few hours after the outage began. It was not clear when power might be more widely restored.

Hospitals in Madrid and Cataluna in Spain suspended all routine medical work but were still attending to critical patients, using backup generators. Several Spanish oil refineries were shut down and retail businesses shut.

The Bank of Spain said electronic banking was functioning ‘adequately’ on backup systems, though residents also reported ATM screens had gone blank.

In Portugal, water supplier EPAL said supplies could also be disrupted, and queues formed at stores by people rushing to purchase emergency supplies like gaslights, generators and batteries.

The main Portuguese electricity utility, EDP, said it had told customers it had no forecast for when the energy supply would be “normalised”, Publico newspaper said. It warned it could take several hours. Parts of France also suffered a brief outage.