One year ago today, all of Spain, and much of Portugal, suffered through a blackout of unprecedented scale and duration. In mere seconds, a cascading sequence of events burst through the grid and created Europe’s first “system black” event in recent memory.
Traffic signals failed, mobile networks stopped working entirely, petrol stations could not pump fuel and supermarkets could not process payments. Madrid’s metro came to a halt and people had to be pulled out of carriages. “People were stunned because this had never happened in Spain,” Carlos Condori, a 19-year-old construction sector worker, told AFP at the time. “There’s no [phone] coverage, I can’t call my family, my parents, nothing: I can’t even go to work.”
