On April 28th of 2025, Spain and Portugal went under a severe blackout that caused the entirety of the country’s power to shut down. A week after the outage that left 50 million people without electricity, authorities have still not confirmed what caused the blackout to happen in the first place.
A power outage mostly occurs when severe weather conditions are involved in the area, equipment fails, such as overloading networks or transformators malfunction, and even human errors like car crashes or mistakes in construction, causing disruptions in circuits. In this case, the frequency in the grid became unstable 3 hours before the outage actually occurred. Power quality sensors showed an unstable grid that wiped out all of Spain and Portugal’s electricity/power. Instead of a normal, steady voltage, data proves that the oscillations, or the process of moving back and forth while changing in a repetitive pattern, increased frequency and magnitude over the next 3 hours until the grid eventually failed and completely shut down. As of now, the instability of the grid is unknown, but people suspect the authorities know exactly what caused this outage and how this has happened but refuse to tell the public. They say the people might not give an answer until months later, which wavers the public’s trust in the government even further.
When it comes to money, people have adapted to spending their savings online by shopping on websites like Amazon, using digital currency like bitcoin, and even credit cards, which are considered to be a virtual type of cash that isn’t yet paid off. Because the blackout shut down every electronic device in the country, an estimation calculates that $454 million dollars from the Spanish economy had been wiped out, as the power outage interrupted the use of online purchases, credit cards, and withdrawals from cash machines such as ATM’s.
The outage lasted about 10 hours in total, starting from 12:30PM to around 10:30 in the morning, but others suggest the power began to go into overdrive long before in the afternoon. It was as if the build up of electricity led to the explosion of the blackout at midnight. Besides the stress caused by lack of communication/transportation throughout the country, disconnecting from social media or electronics in general allowed people to travel back in time to a whole new world where phones, computers, and television never existed. In a way, the blackout brought people together just like life used to be when these new inventions weren’t a part of everyone’s everyday lives.
The blackout in Spain and Portugal can have a bad opinion, or a more positive opinion, with disconnection from virtual society and interactions with the outside world. Either way, the blackout was the largest power outage in the history of Europe, and who knows if the blackout is headed towards other countries if we are yet to hear the reason behind this temporary crisis.
