agencies
Madrid/Lisbon
Spain, Portugal and parts of southwestern France have been hit by a widespread power blackout that paralysed public transport, caused large traffic jams, delayed flights, and left residents unable to access cash from ATMs, as utility operators scrambled to restore the electric grid.
Investigations into the causes of the outage on Monday were ongoing, but Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro said there was “no indication” of a cyberattack. Speaking to reporters, he also said he expected electrical power to be restored “in the coming hours”. The Portuguese National Cybersecurity Centre also said there was no sign the disruption was due to a cyberattack.
In a televised address, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said there was no conclusive information on the cause of the blackout. He added that interconnections with neighbouring France and Morocco had partially restored supply, while “combined cycles and hydroelectric plants throughout the country have also been reactivated, which should allow us to recover the supply across Spain soon.”
The Spanish and Portuguese governments quickly convened emergency cabinet meetings after the outage, which also briefly affected a part of France bordering northeastern Spain.
Earlier, the head of operations of Spain’s grid operator Red Electrica de Espana (REE), Eduardo Prieto, told a news conference that restoring power to the Spanish electric grid could take six to 10 hours. REE said electricity had returned to parts of northern, southern and western Spain.
The Spanish government urged residents to stay put to avoid traffic chaos. “The government is working to identify the origin of this incident and dedicating all possible resources to resolve it as quickly as possible,” Sanchez’s office said in a statement.
The entity responsible for transmitting electricity in Portugal, Redes Energeticas Nacionais (REN), said a rare atmospheric phenomenon in Spain due to extreme temperature variations in the country’s interior was to blame for the power outages across the Iberian Peninsula. In a later statement, REN said that fully restoring the country’s power grid could take up to a week.
There were traffic jams in Madrid city centre as traffic lights stopped working, Cadena SER radio station reported, as well as people trapped in stalled metro cars and lifts in the Spanish capital.
Panicked residents tried in vain to get a signal as the phone lines cut. “There’s no [phone] coverage, I can’t call my family, my parents, nothing: I can’t even go to work,” Carlos Condori told AFP. “People [are] stunned, because this had never happened in Spain”.
At Cibeles Square, one of Madrid’s busiest thoroughfares, the blackout of traffic lights unleashed a cacophony of sirens, whistles and car horns as police tried to control the pile-up of traffic.
The Portuguese police said traffic lights were affected across the country, the metro was closed in Lisbon and Porto, and trains were not running.
