Most of Spain and Portugal, plus parts of France, experienced a total blackout midday Monday, leaving mass transit passengers stranded and people wandering their streets looking at phones that could no longer connect to the Internet. The blackout reportedly caused “mayhem” across major cities and “chaos” on the streets as traffic built up. The cause of the outage is unknown but may be the result of a cyber attack.
Airports have been shut down, transit tunnels are dark with passengers forced to walk back to the station to evacuate subways, businesses are closing, ATMs and electronic payment systems are non-functional, and the internet and telephones are down. The latter outage may be the worst because it means people who are used to getting instant updates cannot do so and are lost without an explanation or a projected up time. While Spain’s grid operator predicts power will be out six to ten hours, I won’t be surprised if it takes longer to repair this kind of cascading failure. Even when the electricity is back on, it will take some time for other services to reboot and reopen.
As society become smore dependent on the internet for communications, transactions, and information, outages of this type become more disruptive than they were 30 years ago when everyone counted on transistor radios and landline phones. Preppers should follow this event to learn from it, identifying system weaknesses and preps they can make to compensate or overcome them. It will also be interesting to see how residents react to a mass outage. Will they pull together or will panic take over? Will they work together or resort to crime and violence?
One telling image is people “queuing for candles” in a local shop. Can you imagine being so unprepared you don’t even have a candle?
Published 4/28/2025. View full article. And another article.
