Sawt Falasteen - Massive blackout hits all of Spain and Portugal

As Spain's government scrambled to find the cause of the outage, which hit at 12:30 pm (1030 GMT), ordinary people were left in the dark -- often literally -- as to what was happening.

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

"There's no (phone) coverage, I can't call my family, my parents, nothing: I can't even go to work," he said.

In Madrid and elsewhere customers rushed to withdraw cash from banks, and streets filled with crowds trying in vain to get a signal on their mobiles. Others were trapped in elevators or inside garages.

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

Due to stop lights being knocked out, cars crawled or stopped altogether as police tried to direct traffic. Authorities told motorists to stay off the roads.

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.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez held an emergency meeting on the situation, his office said in a Telegram message.

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".

- 'Cannot speculate' -

The head of operations for Spain's grid operator Red Electrica, Eduardo Prieto, said "we cannot speculate right now on the causes" of the blackout, but everything was being done to identify its origin.

He added that repairs were already being carried out, but that it would take six to 10 hours to restore power to the country, "if all goes well".

Red Electrica said later on Monday that power was again flowing in parts of the north, south and west of Spain.

Portugal's REN operator said the entire Iberian peninsula was affected by the blackout -- an area that includes Spain's 48 million people, and 10.5 million in Portugal -- adding that it was "impossible to predict when the situation will be normalised".

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.

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

It added that the cause of the multi-country outage "remains to be determined".

Transport chaos also gripped Spain's second most populous 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.

burs/rmb/jm

H.Nasr--SF-PST