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