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Most of Spain and all of Portugal were hit by a major blackout that impacted public transport, airports and phone service, leaving authorities scrambling to find the causes for one of the worst outages in Europe in years.

Data from Spain’s grid operator Red Electrica showed power demand in freefall just after noon on Monday, dropping more than 10 gigawatts — more than a third of the country’s total electricity usage for the day. The sudden outage caught out millions of people.

“This is very weird and unsettling,” said Ana López, who works at the Castellana financial area and was exiting her office building after her employee sent all the staff home.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Vice President Sara Aagesen held an emergency meeting at the headquarters of Red Electrica as they sought answers. Backup plans were put in place by utilities, the Spanish operator said . Portugal’s grid operator REN said it was investigating.

A countrywide blackout is very unusual for any European country. In 2003, Italy saw the worst power cut in more than half a century when a breakdown of electricity lines from neighboring countries impacted the whole country, except for the island of Sardinia. In 2019, a major outage hit London when two major generators, a gas plant and an offshore wind farm, went offline almost simultaneously.

“I ask all people in Madrid to absolutely minimize movement,” José Luis Martínez-Almeida, the city’s mayor said in a . “The traffic lights are down at the moment and it’s essential that emergency services can circulate.”

An excess of solar generation in the grid could have contributed to the outage. Spain has reported an unprecedented number of hours with in recent months as more solar and wind power gets injected into the grid. Still, the oversupply of power hasn’t previously caused blackouts in the country.

The stock market operated normally in both countries, with Spain’s Ibex35 trimming earlier gains shortly after the blackout hit.

At this stage, there’s no evidence yet regarding the cause, and a cyber attack has not been ruled out, according to people familiar to the situation. Investigations are ongoing as authorities work to restore the network.

Public transport, traffic lights and phone services were mostly down in parts of Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon due to the outage, while trains were mostly halted. The main Madrid airport has cautioned that it’s experiencing a high degree of delays. Companies in Spain sent workers home and the streets of major cities quickly filled with people, with police directing traffic.

In Madrid, the metro was evacuated and office workers filled the pathways of the city’s financial district, while ambulances raced through the main thoroughfare Castellana avenue, where traffic agents used speakers on cars to direct cars and people. ATMs in the city center were not working.

Spain’s Canary and Balearic Islands were unaffected, according to a government spokesperson. Issues also didn’t spread to France.

Photograph: A customer browses items at a supermarket using the torch of a smartphone, in Tremp, Spain, on April 28, 2025. Photo credit: Javier Mostacero Carrera/Getty Images

Topics Europe