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Spain and Portugal power outage: what caused it, and was there a cyber-attack?

Several countries in Europe have been scrambling to restore electricity after a huge power cut caused blackouts

Houses, offices, trains, traffic lights and even the Madrid open tennis tournament were all hit, causing chaos for millions of people and prompting a scramble by the Spanish and Portuguese governments and network operators to understand the problem and race to fix it. REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. Georg Zachmann, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels thinktank, said the system had suffered “cascading disconnections of power plants” – including one in France – when the frequency of the grid dropped below the European standard of 50Hz.

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