Spain-Portugal power outage live: Cyberattack being investigated as possible blackout cause by Madrid court
Spain’s High Court will investigate whether a cyberattack may have caused one of Europe’s most severe blackouts which plunged the Iberian peninsula into darkness.
Power has now returned to households in Spain and neighbouring Portugal. Investigators still looking into the cause of the blackout, which remains unclear, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez said Tuesday afternoon.
The investigation comes despite Spain’s grid operator REE all but ruling out a cyberattack in its preliminary assessment of the outage, which prompted travel chaos and left many without water, Wi-Fi or mobile network for hours.
If a cyberattack were found to be behind the blackout, Judge Jorge Calama would investigate it as a crime of terrorism, a court document showed.
Despite power being returned around Spain and Portugal on Tuesday morning, travel chaos continued into its second day with large bustling crowds still in Madrid’s train station.
Around 500 flights were cancelled in total due to the blackout, according to an estimate by The Independent’s travel correspondent Simon Calder.
“What happened yesterday cannot ever happen again,” Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez said Tuesday afternoon, vowing to hold private operators to account.
