Dozens of people take shelter at Atocha train station, Madrid, where they spent the night after the electricity blackout in Spain on April 28, 2025.?Photo: VCG

 

Power started returning to parts of the Iberian Peninsula late Monday after a massive outage brought much of Spain and Portugal to a standstill, according to Reuters. Euronews quoted Teresa Ribera, European Commission executive vice president for clean energy promotion, as calling the blackout "one of the most serious episodes recorded in Europe in recent times."

The unexpected outage grounded planes, halted public transport and forced hospitals to suspend routine operations, media reports said. 

Spain's Interior Ministry declared a national emergency, deploying 30,000 police across the country to keep order as governments from the two countries convened emergency cabinet meetings, the Reuters report said.

A Chinese resident surnamed Liang in Barcelona, told the Global Times the power started to return gradually in the Spanish city after about 16 hours of blackout. 

"I was working in the office. At first, there was intermittent internet connection, but by around 4 pm in the afternoon, it was completely down." 

Liang said she still didn't expect the outage to stay that long. "I always thought it was almost back. I didn't dare to move around and had no means of communication either. Luckily, our children in schools are fine. They stay until 2 pm when the class ends."

Outages on such a scale are extremely rare in Europe. The cause was unclear, with Portugal suggesting the issue originated in Spain and Spain pointing the finger at a break-up in its connection to France, Reuters reported. 

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that almost 11 hours after the nation ground to a halt, government experts were still trying to determine what happened. 

"We have never had a complete collapse of the system," Sánchez said, before detailing that at 12:33 pm on Monday Spain's power grid lost 15 gigawatts, the equivalent of 60 percent of its national demand, in a matter of five seconds, per Reuters report. 

Spanish power distributor Red Eléctrica's head of operations Eduardo Prieto said the event was "exceptional and extraordinary." 

Spain had recovered more than 92 percent of its power by 5 am on Tuesday, according to Red Eléctrica.

According to AP reports, the outage began at midday. Offices closed and traffic was snarled in Madrid and Lisbon, while some civilians in Barcelona directed traffic. Train services in both countries stopped.

Hospitals and other emergency services switched to generators and gas stations stopped working. It wasn't possible to make calls on most mobile phone networks, though some apps were sporadically working. People searched for battery-powered radios, the AP said. 

About 43 percent of Spain's energy comes from wind and solar power, with nuclear accounting for a further 20 percent and fossil fuels 23 percent, Reuters quoted an energy think tank Ember. 

Earlier, parts of France suffered a brief outage. RTE, the French grid operator, said that it had moved to supplement power to some parts of northern Spain after the outage hit, according to Reuters.

Portuguese transmission system operator REN first suggested that the damage to a high-voltage line in southwestern France from a fire was a possible cause. The company later blamed extreme temperature variations inside Spain for anomalous oscillations in 400 kV lines, according to Balkan Green Energy News. 

Spain's national cybersecurity office stated that it had gathered evidence suggesting the power outage could be the result of a cyberattack, but this claim has been denied by Portuguese and EU officials, the Euronews reported.

In 2003 a problem with a hydroelectric power line between Italy and Switzerland caused a major outage across the whole Italian peninsula for around 12 hours. In 2006, an overloaded power network in Germany caused electricity cuts across parts of Europe and as far as Morocco, Reuters reports said.