The lights are back on in Spain and Portugal, but nobody knows why they went out
Power was mostly restored across the Iberian Peninsula Tuesday, after a massive outage hit Spain and Portugal, grounding aircrafts, and disrupting traffic.
MADRID — Power was almost entirely restored in Spain and Portugal early Tuesday, after a massive outage hit tens of millions of people across the countries and parts of France, grounding aircraft, disrupting traffic and bringing daily life to a grinding halt.
All 6.4 million electricity consumers in Portugal were once again receiving power, the country's government said Tuesday, adding that while trains and airports had resumed operations, there was still “some recovery to be done” at Lisbon’s main airport.
In Spain, the other country on the Iberian Peninsula, grid operator Red Electrica said in a post on X that more than 99% of the peninsula’s demand was being served and that all of its substations were operational again.
Power failures of this scale are rare in Europe, and when the outage hit around noon Monday (6 a.m. ET), airports were disabled and shops and offices were plunged into darkness.
It took the better part of a day to restore full power to at least two major European economies — the tiny principality of Andorra in the Pyrenees Mountains was also hit.
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