Spain France Portugal power outage

[Beachwaves127]

Looks bad! I haven’t seen much on hospitals / emergency services but I’ve more seen comments on travel - roads trains planes. Hope they can fix it and wonder what caused it.

I cannot tell you how much I am appreciating the introduction of the verb "to bork" to my vocabulary.

Was the server eventually deborked? Or was it a terminal borkage event??

Ah, that'll teach me not to cut corners ..

Geographic latitude ..yes

Geomagnetic latitude (roughly speaking distance from magnetic.pole) no.

New York is much further north, and it is geomagnetic latitude that's a big factor in your exposure to things like solar storms, frequency of seeing aurora etc.

Over my head... can you explain? 🙏

I'm rubbing my hands in anticipation of a bumper crop of "How this happened" diagrams in the media over the next couple of days.

I assume she’s referencing the physicist Dr.Brian Cox?

That's ev's running low but then petrol pumps will be off as well.

Good old Eddie, he loves that space time continuum😄

... it's a common enough expression round our way, sire .. 😀

Yes, it was "de-borked" (or you could just say "fixed" ...). Memory i dim, but I think what happened was a critical volume got marked "dirty" on the first restart. However when it was cut off that marker stayed and meant that the next time it rebooted it threw a fit and wanted someone to press a key on the console to continue.

These days you could probably do that over a connection if the server or it's rack has out of bounds provision. Otherwise it's a trip to a data centre for you.

This is why you should test - and test regularly - your BCP/DR. To iron out any wrinkles.

Some things to consider, Spain has used only renewable energy since 16th April 2025 and in terms of global warming, people start putting own their air conditioning on earlier and earlier so putting a lot of additional stress on the system.

BBC news says cyber attack.

no they don't

As part of my emergency pack, I have a solar charger and wind up radio that also has a charger (not sure how effective that would be) we also keep a couple of charged power packs (child of the 70s)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9t?post=asset%3A5128d17e-5365-4a50-ba8b-0165cd5c3c95#post

https://demanda.ree.es/visiona/peninsula/demandaau/total

My husband flew to Madrid this morning with work. He had to walk from the airport to the hotel as didn't have enough cash for a cab and metro, uber and traffic lights down. He got there and couldn't check in as no electricity and hotel won't let him stay there. He walked to the office but it was closed. He's been unable to get internet. Apparently though his boss is staying in a luxury hotel with a generator so they are heading there to see if he can finally get food and a drink. He may have to end up crashing at the hotel.

There's a vacuum of information, so the conspiracy theories will have time to spread.

It is very odd, but hopefully there will be a solid explanation for it. Otherwise no one will believe it.

My daughter in Barcelona text me just after it happened. She was at a conference and she was saying she was heading back to her apartment ( they were all told to leave) and it was a 30min walk as no Metro. That was at 1pm but unfortunately I haven't been able to contact her since. It seems the whole phone/ Internet system is down. Last thing i text her was to be careful walking as there are no traffic lights. Im really worried

This is when you realise that "low cost/high efficiency" is synonymous with fragile.

Back in the day when those machines were almost the only option, I had a "switch" card that didn't have raised numbers and cashier's just wrote the numbers on the slip of paper with the car on paper underneath and I'd sign them.

Why do people think that a weather event is so unlikely? It is very very warm today for April here and if it’s something like an area which has frost overnight then heats up a lot in the day, even if only a little hotter than average, couldn’t that cause massive issues if the physical components can’t cope? I don’t know anything specific about Spanish weather BTW it just doesn’t sound impossible to me!

Brace yourself for a wave of articles in the right wing media blaming renewable energy - "Net Zero causes BLACKOUT CHAOS!!" kind of thing.

From something I've just read in the Guardian, there is a....tenuous connection, it seems. More to do with how the grid is structured I think, but it makes me realise I need to read around the subject a bit more.

Aliens.

I don't know much about it but isn't it odd that Spain has gone fully renewable energy 2 weeks ago? Why is it so far fetched that there could be teething issues with the new system? Again, I don't know enough about it but could be plausible.

I’ve just flown in from Barcelona. It was so weird, the whole airport just ground to a stop . The police and security guards were putting up manual shutters to keep people in designated areas. After about 20 minutes power came on. Back up generator maybe? But flight delayed, also delay in refuelling! Truck was affected by electricity outage!

It literally said the opposite, that at this stage a cyber attack isn’t what the evidence points to.