According to Reuters News, this outage affected millions of homes and businesses across Europe, while disrupting traffic, delaying flights, locking people in elevators and metro buses, and forcing hospitals to stop work. Electrical companies were left to scramble to find the problem and restore power to all who had lost it.
The loss of power to the traffic lights created massive traffic jams all across Europe. Spain and Portugal governments met immediately to address the situation and to find the problem. Portugal’s Prime Minister reassured that a cyber attack was highly unlikely to have caused this blackout. However, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez of Spain talked with a NATO official to discuss a possible sabotage. Sanchez reported that the country had lost 60% of its national electricity demand in the first 5 seconds of the outage. He said that It is not exactly known how this blackout happened, but countries are pointing fingers at each other. Portugal blamed Spain, and Spain blamed the electrical connection along its border with France.
The outage only lasted a few hours in the Basque and Barcelona regions of Spain, but as of 11:39 am on April 28, power was not yet restored to the other affected areas.
Spanish hospitals in Madrid and Cataluna stopped all of their routine medical practices, while only focusing on those who were in critical condition. Much of the hospitals were left temporarily dysfunctional, except areas powered by backup generators where medical assistance was still needed.
Numerous Spanish oil refineries, as well as some retail businesses and stores have shut down.
Citizens reported that ATM screens had gone blank, even though The Bank of Spain claimed that electronic banking was still operational on its backup systems.
On April 28 at 12 pm, the country of Spain was consuming 27,000 megawatts, exactly the predicted amount, but by 1 pm that day, consumption had dropped by more than half to 12,000 megawatts, much lower than what was predicted across the whole day. Mayor Jose Luiz Martinez-Almeida urged Madrid citizens to stay at home and limit their travel so medical personnel could drive around as efficiently as possible.
In Portugal, residents rushed into stores to buy emergency supplies as quickly as they could, while the flow of water supplies were halted. The loss of power to the traffic lights created massive traffic jams, too.
A major Portuguese electrical company said that it could take several hours for the power to be restored. As of Monday night, April 28, 61% of the region’s electricity had been restored.
The outage left tens of thousands stranded in train cars in remote areas, 35,000 of which have been rescued, but 11 trains are still stranded, as of April 28.
Experts noted that it’s very rare for Europe to have large-scale power outages, but they can occur. In 2006, a German power network was overloaded until failure, causing a mass-outage stretching from Germany to Morocco.
As of April 28, it’s still uncertain how this was caused, and there are many different possibilities. Board member Joan Conceicao said that a possible cause could’ve been a massive oscillation in electrical voltage in the Spain and Portugal electrical systems.
Stay tuned into Reuters News for the latest updates.
