Newsroom
Spain and Portugal are slowly bouncing back from what’s being called one of the biggest blackouts in Europe’s modern history — but no one seems to know exactly why it happened.
On Monday afternoon, at precisely 12:33 p.m., something extraordinary occurred: about 60% of Spain’s electricity, equal to 15 gigawatts, suddenly vanished from the grid for five seconds. That’s all it took to plunge major cities into darkness, leave trains stalled, and send tens of thousands scrambling for information in the dark.
By Tuesday morning, power was restored to nearly all homes and businesses, and both countries’ electricity networks were declared “fully stabilized.” But the mystery remains: what caused the sudden power collapse?
“It’s something that’s never happened before,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in a statement, adding that all possible causes are being investigated. “The experts still haven’t been able to determine the reason, but they will. Nothing is being ruled out.”
Despite wild speculation online, Spain’s national weather service was quick to clear the air, literally. They said no strange weather or atmospheric events were recorded on the day of the blackout.
The outage brought daily life to a halt. In Madrid, some 150,000 people were evacuated from the metro system after trains ground to a halt in stations and tunnels. Around 35,000 more were rescued from stranded trains across the country. Atocha, Madrid’s main railway station, turned into an overnight camp for stranded passengers, with people curled up on cardboard and jackets waiting for updates.
By Tuesday, life was mostly back to normal, shops reopened, metro lines restarted, and the airport was running again. Still, local train disruptions continued in some regions, and confusion lingered.
Large-scale blackouts are rare in Europe. While the continent has experienced outages in the past, like the 2003 blackout in Italy or the 2006 grid overload in Germany, the scale and suddenness of Monday’s event have puzzled experts.
*With information from The Guardian
