Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

Cyberattack? Bad software update? International oopsie? The cause is unclear, but Iberia is dark

Updated A massive power outage has left Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France without electricity, and the cause has yet to be identified.

Spanish rail giant Renfe said trains across the country had stopped as of 1230 Central European Time (1030 UTC) as "the entire national electricity grid was cut off," with Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica confirming it was working on plans to restore power. Spanish power companies Endesa and Iberdrola have also confirmed outages with alert messages on their websites at the time of writing. 

E-Redes, the majority grid operator in Portugal, confirmed a widespread outage in its coverage area to various media outlets before its website went offline, which it still is as of writing. According to reports, E-Redes said the peninsula-wide outage was caused by an unspecified "problem with the European electricity system" that led it to deliberately cut power to some areas in order to stabilize the grid. E-Redes currently has no estimate on restoration, according to Portuguese news site Expresso, which noted that the 1230 CET outage caused a sudden drop of more than 90 percent in electrical consumption in the country. 

The outage also reportedly affected some areas in southern France, albeit briefly, and the tiny nation of Andorra, which shares borders with Spain and France. Spain and Portugal have a combined population of more than 50 million people. 

Life in the Iberian peninsula has ground to a halt thanks to the outage, with airports either offline or operating on backup power with delays, subways in cities like Madrid in the dark and evacuated, hospitals running on generators and Spanish officials urging citizens to stay off the roads, per Italian news outlet La Repubblica. 

Play at the Madrid Open tennis tournament has also been affected, with tournament organizers taking to X to inform fans that play was on hold until power could be restored.

Red Eléctrica has since reported that it is gradually restoring power in the north and south of Spain, and that the effort is ongoing.

Worth pointing out is the lack of reports on DownDetector in either nation of substantial outages outside of power, suggesting Spanish and Portuguese datacenters are still operating on backup power. Then again, with reports of telephone service outages as well, residents might not have had a chance to check in with their favorite services. 

Cyberattack behind dual-nation outage?

Aside from E-Redes' ambiguous statement about European grid trouble, there hasn't been anything said about what might be behind the outage, but a cyberattack hasn't been ruled out yet. 

According to La Repubblica, the Spanish National Cryptology Center, an arm of the government's intelligence service, is investigating whether that could be the case. If so, the attack would be a massive success for whoever was behind it - and Russia is a potential culprit. 

Spain has become the target of cyberattacks by Russian-linked actors thanks to its support for Ukraine. Russian threat actors took responsibility for an attack aimed at a defense company refurbishing tanks destined for Ukraine last June, and Spanish authorities arrested several pro-Russian miscreants the following month for their connection to multiple attacks on Spanish companies. 

In other words, a cyberattack wouldn't be completely out of the question and a strain on the grid wouldn't be impossible either, with datacenter space scarce and power demands predicted to climb considerably in the next few years, putting transmission networks in a tight spot.

We've reached out to Spanish officials with questions, and haven't heard back yet. ® 

Updated to add at 2240 UTC

It's apparently all due to some bad vibrations. Portugal's national grid operator said in a statement:

Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as induced atmospheric vibration. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.