2025 European power outage

A request that this article title be changed to 2025 Iberian Peninsula power outage is under discussion. Please do not move this article until the discussion is closed.

This article documents a current event. Information may change rapidly and initial news reports may be unreliable. The latest updates to this article may not reflect the most current information. Feel free to improve this article or discuss changes on the talk page, but please note that updates without valid and reliable references will be removed. (April 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

2025 European blackout

Police handling traffic in Cartagena, Spain, with disabled traffic signals.
Date	28 April 2025
Time	12:33 (CEST); 11:33 (WEST)
Location	Mainland Portugal, mainland Spain, Andorra and parts of southwest France
Type	Power outage
Cause	Unknown

On 28 April 2025, at 12:33 CEST and 11:33 WEST, a major power outage occurred across the Iberian Peninsula affecting mainland Portugal and Spain, where electric power was interrupted for hours.

Minor outages lasting seconds or minutes occurred in adjacent regions of Andorra and parts of southwestern France,^[1] while Gibraltar was not affected.^[2] Reports indicated issues with the European synchronous electricity grid. Traffic lights in many places stopped working and metro lines had to be evacuated.^[3]

At approximately 16:00 (CEST), Spanish electrical operator Red Eléctrica de España (REE) estimated it would take "between six and ten hours" to restore service^[4] calling the outage "exceptional and totally extraordinary".^[5] At around the same time the Portuguese network operator Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN) indicated it could take up to a week for operations to return to normal.^[6]

In Portugal, the blackout brought the trains and traffic lights to a halt. Mobile networks also experienced severe limitations, particularly voice calls with data services. Hospitals resorted to generators to maintain operations.^[7]

The Lisbon Metro was stopped due to signaling issues and trains were evacuated.^[8] Fertagus commuter rail trains were stopped at stations. Additional police were deployed to deal with traffic problems caused by the failure of traffic lights. Lisbon Airport operated with limitations and closed at around 13:00 (WEST), although flights were allowed to take off from around 21:38 (WEST). Meanwhile, airports in Porto and Faro switched to generator power.^[9]

The cabinet of Prime Minister Luis Montenegro held an emergency meeting over the outage.^[10]

The island regions of Madeira and the Azores, disconnected from the European grid, remained unaffected.^[11] Electricity was fully restored in Portugal by 29 April.^[12]

Spanish train operator Renfe said that the "entire National Electricity Grid was cut off" at 12:30 (CEST).^[13][14] Around 35,000 passengers were rescued after being stranded across the rail and undergound systems.^[15] Madrid's Barajas International Airport was left without power.^[1]

Spanish authorities reported that the country's nuclear power plants were taken off the grid automatically due to the loss of grid power.^[16] Telecommunications and internet services were also affected, with Netblocks saying that web connections plunged to just 17 percent of normal usage.^[17] Likewise, data from the national grid showed that nationwide demand fell sharply at around 12:15 (CEST) from 27,500 MW to nearly 15,000 MW.^[18]

The city of Madrid activated its emergency plan PEMAM (Plan Territorial de Emergencia Municipal del Ayuntamiento de Madrid).

King Felipe VI was meeting with the president of Cyprus, Nikos Christodoulides, who was on an official visit, but the meeting was able to be maintained because the blackout only partially affected the Palacio de la Zarzuela. The King was able to maintain the institutional agenda for the day.^[19] The Congress of Deputies, the Bolsa de Madrid, the Parliament of Catalonia and the Palacio de la Moncloa were also left without power.^[20] The Senate suspended its parliamentary activity for 29 April.^[21]

The Canary Islands, Balearic Islands, Ceuta, and Melilla were unaffected.^[3][22] Travellers entering Gibraltar by land from Spain reported delays due to the unavailability of IT services at the Spanish border post. Gibraltar itself was not affected, as it is not connected to the European grid.^[2]

Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez convened an emergency meeting of the National Security Council over the outage.^[18]

Later in the day, airports were back to operation with 20% reduced capacity and the Minister of Transport Óscar Puente saying long and medium distance train services would not resume until the next day.^[23] By 07:00 on 29 April, electricity had been restored to 99% of energy demand.^[15]

Andorran electricity supplier Forces Elèctriques d'Andorra said that the power outage from Spain impacted the principality for a few seconds. An automatic recovery system connected Andorra's power grid to the French one. Phone and internet operator Andorra Telecom reported a similar outage for internet connections.^[24]

Electricity transmission system operator Réseau de Transport d'Électricité reported a power outage that lasted only a few minutes in the French Basque Country.^[25]

Internet providers such as Orange experienced issues in Morocco due to servers in Spain being offline.^[26]

A fire, reported to be in Southern France between Perpignan and eastern Narbonne, which damaged an extra-high-voltage power line, was identified as a possible cause by REN^[27] but this was dismissed by France's Réseau de Transport d'Électricité (RTE), the nationwide transmission system operator in charge of maintaining the power line, which declared on its official X account that there were no fires in the area.^[28]

The Spanish cybersecurity agency INCIBE [es] was reported to be investigating the possibility that a cyberattack caused the incident,^[29][30] although initial analysis did not show any evidence of an attack.^[31] On the morning of 29 April, the REE attributed the outage to a massive disconnection of the grid in the south-west of Spain. The institution ruled out a cyber-attack as the cause of the blackout and announced that it was investigating the cause of the disconnection.^[32]

• 2003 Italy blackout - the previous largest blackout in Europe, 21 years earlier
• List of the largest power outages

• Video of the power outage at the WTA Madrid Open during an interview with Coco Gauff.