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A sense of crisis gripped Spain and Portugal on Monday as a massive power outage plunged both countries into darkness, disrupting essential services and daily life. Spanish authorities are urgently seeking to determine the cause of the blackout.
The operator, Red Electrica, said it would likely take six to 10 hours to restore power in the country and urged people not to speculate as to the cause of the outage.
Images posted on social media showed metro stations plunged into darkness, with trains halted, and people in offices and hallways using the light on their phones to see.
The national road authority DGT told motorists to stop driving, because stop lights were out, forcing vehicles to slow to avoid collisions and police officers to direct traffic at intersections. People were seen coming out into the streets, holding their smartphones up to try to connect to a network.
People were also trapped in lifts, Spanish media reported.
The internet activity monitoring site Netblocks said the blackout caused a "loss of much of the country's digital infrastructure". It said web connections plunged to just 17 percent of normal usage.
Portugal's REN operator said in a statement to AFP that all the Iberian peninsula was affected by the blackout, adding that the outage occurred around midday.
There was also a brief blackout in southwest France, that country's electricity operator said, but power was now restored. "An electrical incident is currently affecting Spain and Portugal, the cause of which remains to be determined," France's high-voltage grid operator RTE said.
Spain's railway operator Adif said that the power cut halted trains across the entire country.
Airports operator Aena said there were flight delays, but the country's airports were still operational thanks to "contingency electricity systems".
Spain's Red Electrica said it had managed to start restoring power in the north and south of the country but the problem was not yet resolved.
"We are continuing to work to bring back power," it said.
Spain's El Pais newspaper posted photos on its website of stopped metro trains in Madrid, police directing traffic, and its own reporters working in a darkened office by the torchlight. It also reported that hospitals' core departments were able to keep functioning because of back-up generators, even if some other units were left without power.
