It will take a week to restore electricity: Portugal has named the cause of the blackout in Europe

Utility operators have begun restoration efforts, but the Spanish company Red Eléctrica said it could take six to 10 hours to repair the damage. The exact cause of the incident is still unknown, but officials are not ruling out the possibility of a cyberattack. This is reported by Reuters.

The shutdown caused chaos in both states: traffic lights stopped working, which provoked huge congestion on the roads, transport networks stopped, and hospitals were left without electricity. People were stuck in subways and lifts. In Madrid, hundreds of citizens were forced to leave office buildings and waited in the streets while police presence was stepped up near key sites. Law enforcers regulated traffic by hand, while patrol cars with lights on cruised through the city centre.

Meanwhile, the governments of Spain and Portugal held emergency meetings to discuss the situation. A crisis management was set up, and in Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez personally visited the Red Eléctrica control centre. The authorities said they are directing all resources to finding out the causes and consequences of the incident as soon as possible. Red Eléctrica is working with regional utilities to restore power. In Portugal, REN has also launched an emergency plan to restore power in stages.

The scale of the outage was felt even beyond Spain and Portugal, with parts of France also temporarily without power. The European Commission has contacted the authorities of the affected countries and the European network of transmission system operators ENTSO-E to clarify the circumstances.

The outage affected many areas of life. In Madrid, tall buildings such as the Torre Emperador skyscraper were evacuated and sirens and helicopters rumbled through the city. There were also problems with communications: mobile signal was intermittently lost, causing panic among parents rushing to pick up their children from schools. Madrid Mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida urged citizens to minimise travel and stay at home via social media.

Transport hubs were also severely disrupted. AENA, which operates a network of 46 Spanish airports, reported flight delays across the country. In Portugal, operator ANA activated emergency generators at Porto and Faro airports, which allowed limited operations to be maintained, while in Lisbon operations were severely disrupted. At the moment, the airports of Madeira and the Azores have not been affected by the consequences of the shutdown.

It should be noted that such large-scale power failures are extremely rare in Europe. The last major incident of this scale occurred in 2003, when a problem at a hydroelectric power station between Italy and Switzerland left the entire Italian peninsula without light for 12 hours.