Spain, Portugal and parts of southwestern France have been hit by a widespread, massive power blackout that paralysed public transport, caused large traffic jams, delayed airline flights, and left residents unable to access cash from ATMs, as utility operators scrambled to restore the grid.
The Spanish and Portuguese governments convened emergency cabinet meetings after the outage on Monday, which also briefly affected a part of France bordering northeastern Spain.
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The head of operations of Spain’s grid operator REE, Eduardo Prieto, told a news conference that restoring power to the Spanish electric grid could take between six and ten hours.
Authorities were unable to explain the cause of the outage at least an hour after it occurred, though a possible cyber-attack had not been ruled out and investigations were ongoing, officials said.
Spain’s 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,” Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s office said.
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The European Commission said it was “in contact” with local authorities “to understand the underlying cause” of the massive blackout. “The commission will keep monitoring the situation and make sure that there is smooth information exchange amongst all relevant parties,” a spokesperson for the EU’s executive arm said.
There were traffic jams in Madrid city centre as traffic lights stopped working, Cader Ser Radio station reported, as well as people trapped in stalled metro cars and elevators in the Spanish capital.
Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen, reporting from the Spanish city of Valencia, said the outage had seemed a temporary one at first and “everyone carried on doing their normal business.” “But a little later, it turned out to be much larger. ATMs are not working, traffic lights are not working,” Vaessen said.
The Madrid Open tennis tournament was suspended, forcing 15th seed Grigor Dimitrov and British opponent Jacob Fearnley off the court as scoreboards went dark and overhead cameras lost power.
Portuguese police said traffic lights were affected across the country, the metro was closed in Lisbon and Porto, and trains were not running.
Portugal’s utility REN said “all plans for the phased restoration of energy supply are being activated, in coordination with European energy producers and operators.”
“REN is in permanent contact with official entities, namely the National Civil Protection Authority. At the same time, the possible causes of this incident are being assessed,” a spokesperson said.
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In France, grid operator RTE said there was a brief outage but power had been restored. It was investigating the cause.
“An electrical incident is currently affecting Spain and Portugal, the cause of which remains to be determined,” RTE said. “In France, homes were without power for several minutes in the Basque Country. All power has since been restored.”
RTE said that its teams had been mobilised to assist the Spanish grid operator, and 700 MW of Spanish consumption had already been restored via France by RTE.
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