Power cuts hit Spain, France and Portugal

Portugal’s power outage had left hundreds of millions of people without electricity — a nationwide blackout of the size of Spain’s European Union

Reports said that several Lisbon subway cars were evacuated. Also in Portugal, courts stopped work and ATMs and electronic payment systems were affected. The traffic lights in Lisbon were out of commission.

The Spanish Department for Traffic is telling people to avoid driving as traffic lights and road signs don’t work. Meanwhile, France’s electricity transmission system operator says that all power has now been restored to the Basque region.

A graph on Spain’s electricity network website showing demand across the country indicated a steep drop around 12:15 p.m. from 27,500MW to near 15,000MW.

On Monday evening, Sánchez said almost half of the power supply in Spain had been recovered. He stated that almost every region in Spain was showing improvement. He also thanked France and Morocco for their assistance in bringing back electricity.

Portuguese distributor E-Redes said the outage was due to “a problem with the European electricity system,” according to Portuguese newspaper Expresso. The company said it was compelled to cut power in specific areas to stabilize the network, according to Expresso.

The power outage halted nearly every aspect of daily life for tens of millions of people — disrupting subways, cutting phone service and shutting down traffic lights and ATM machines. The power for hospitals, nuclear plants and prisons was maintained with back-up systems.

At a press conference on Monday evening, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said a nationwide blackout of this scale had never happened before in Spain.

The president of the European Council and former prime minister of Portugal said that there was no sign of a cyber attack behind the power failure.

No trains or trains in Spain. Air traffic in Spain and Portugal is outage reportedly reported by the Spanish airport operator Aena on X

There were no subways or rail services in Spain. Authorities worked to rescue passengers from 116 trains that were stranded on Monday, the country’s transport minister Oscar Puente wrote on X.

Sky News reported that play was stopped at the Madrid Open tennis tournament. Madrid’s underground rail system was evacuated and traffic lights weren’t working. Air traffic in Spain and Portugal is also reportedly affected by outages at area airports, with Spanish airport operator Aena saying on X that backup generators are currently active at impacted airports. Emergency services in Madrid are also still operational and running on backup generators.