Madrid (AFP) - Large swathes of Spain and Portugal remained without power late on Monday, after being hit by a massive blackout that cut train, phone and internet networks, clogged roads and trapped people inside elevators.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said after an emergency government meeting: “we have no conclusive information about the reasons for this outage”.

He said no hypothesis could be ruled out, warning the public “not to speculate” because of the risk of “misinformation”.

As night fell, only some 35 percent of Spain’s power capacity had been restored, according to the REE electricity operator.

Portugal’s capital Lisbon remained without power, as electricity returned to some 750,000 customers in the country, according to the REN operator, which said the situation was expected to normalise “shortly”.

“People were stunned, because this had never happened in Spain,” said Carlos Candori, a 19-year-old construction worker who had to exit the paralysed metro system in Madrid.

“There’s no (phone) coverage, I can’t call my family, my parents, nothing: I can’t even go to work,” he told AFP.

In Madrid and elsewhere, panicked customers rushed to withdraw cash from banks, and streets filled with crowds trying in vain to get a signal on their mobiles. Long lines formed for taxis and buses.

As a precaution, play was cancelled at the Madrid Open tennis tournament for the rest of the day.

With stop lights knocked out, police tried to direct traffic on roads that became densely congested. Authorities urged motorists to stay off the roads, but communication channels were limited.

Some people were trapped in elevators or inside garages and 286 rescue operations were carried out to free those trapped inside the lifts in the Madrid region, regional authorities said.

Spain’s premier Sanchez called on people to show “responsibility and civility” and said authorities were aiming to restore power nationwide “soon”.

Spain’s railway operator Adif said trains were halted across the country.

Spain’s nuclear power plants also automatically went offline as a safety precaution, with diesel generators maintaining them in a “safe condition”, the Spanish Nuclear Safety Council (CSN) said in a statement.

- ‘Serious disruption’ -

Sanchez said the blackout, which hit at 12:30 pm (1030 GMT), had caused “serious disruption” for millions and “economic losses in businesses, in companies, in industries”.

But he said grid technicians were working to resolve “the problem as soon as possible”, adding that some parts of northern and southern Spain were already able to get power thanks to interconnections from France and Morocco.

Sanchez urged people in Spain to limit the use of their mobile phones to avoid overburdening the network, saying “telecommunications are in a critical moment now”.

The European Commission said it was in contact with Spain and Portugal over the situation, while European Council President Antonio Costa said on X: “There are no indications of any cyberattack”.

The head of operations for Spain’s grid operator Red Electrica, Eduardo Prieto, said that repairs were being carried out, but that it would take six to 10 hours to restore power to the country, “if all goes well”.

Portugal’s REN operator said the entire Iberian peninsula was affected – 48 million people in Spain and 10.5 million in Portugal.

The huge power cut disrupted flights to and from Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon, European air traffic organisation Eurocontrol said, adding it was too early to say how many would be affected.

- France affected -

Southwest France was also briefly affected, but power there was quickly restored, said France’s high-voltage grid operator, RTE.

Transport chaos also gripped Spain’s second city, Barcelona, where locals and tourists alike flooded the streets in an attempt to find out what had happened.

Student Laia Montserrat had to leave her school when the lights went out.

“As the internet wasn’t coming back, they told us to go home… (but) there weren’t trains either,” she told AFP. “Now we don’t know what to do.”

Images posted on social media showed metro stations in Madrid plunged into darkness, with trains halted, and people in offices and hallways using the light on their phones to see.

The internet activity monitoring site Netblocks told AFP 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.

Spain’s El Pais newspaper reported that hospitals used back-up generators to keep critical wards going, but some other units were left without power.

Massive blackouts have affected other countries around the world in recent years.

Huge outages struck Tunisia in September 2023, Sri Lanka in August 2020, and Argentina and Uruguay in June 2019. In July 2012, India experienced a vast blackout.

In Europe, in November 2006, 10 million people were left without power for an hour in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain. That was caused by a failure in Germany’s grid.

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