Power has now been restored in Spain and Portugal after a massive blackout hit the Iberian Peninsula on Monday, April 28, 2025, stranding passengers in trains and elevators while millions lost phone and internet coverage.
Parts of France also briefly lost power.
Trains, both local and cross-country, stopped running in Spain and Portugal. Airports in both countries reported delays. Traffic lights were knocked out, causing chaos on the roads
Play at the Madrid Open was suspended and Spain declared a state of emergency in response to the outage.
On Monday night, many went to bed in darkness, while others posted videos online celebrating the gradual return of power after many hours off-grid.
As of this morning, Tuesday, April 29, 2025, both Spain and Portugal reported power supplies almost back to normal with the network stabilised after the largest power cut in Europe’s recent history.
However, disruption continued, with trains and flights facing delays.
Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez announced that 99.95% of energy demand has been restored in Spain, with 100% of substations back operational, as he headed for another meeting of the national Security Council. “Thank you to all citizens for once again being an example of responsibility and civic spirit,” he said.
Sánchez also warned that people should be careful about misinformation regarding this whole crisis.
The Portuguese government is also expected to meet later this morning.
It earlier issued a short social media update confirming the return of largely normal operations.
According to the government, Schools are set to reopen, and the health service is now fully stable.
Inevitably, people are looking very closely at what might be the cause of the outage.
Spain’s national meteorological office, Aemet, appeared to rule out the weather as a culprit. “During the day of 28 April, no unusual meteorological or atmospheric phenomena were detected, and nor were there sudden variations in the temperature in our network of meteorological stations,” Aemet disclosed.
Cyber Attack Ruled Out As Power Outage’s Cause
Moreover, Spain’s electricity grid operator, Red Eléctrica ruled out cyber-attack as the cause of Monday’s mass blackouts that left millions without power.
Speaking on Tuesday morning, the operator’s head of services, Eduardo Prieto, said that preliminary investigations meant “we can rule out a cybersecurity incident.”
This matches what Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro said on Monday – that there’s no sign a cyberattack was behind the power cut.
Prieto added that there was nothing to suggest “there was any kind of intrusion into the Red Eléctric control system.”
Also, Prieto said that there were two “disconnection events”, barely a second apart, just before the blackout on Monday.
He said the incidents took place in the south-west of Spain, where there is substantial solar generation.
He added that “nothing leads us to believe that it could have been human error.”
Prieto disclosed that systems managed to recover from the first event, but they couldn’t recover from the second, which led to the power outage in Spain and Portugal.
When asked, Prieto admitted that it is “very possible” that the affected generation was solar, though he said that authorities don’t yet have enough information to be sure.
Finally, he said that Red Eléctrica restored power to the grid by using hydro and combined-cycle gas, which operate through a combined gas and steam turbine method.
On Monday, the regional President of Andalucía, Juanma Moreno, suggested that a cyberattack was the likely cause.
However, that was then quickly dismissed by other officials close to the government.
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