On April 28, 2025, Western Europe experienced an unprecedented power outage that affected Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Andorra, according to local media, including Portugal's Publico and Spain's El Mundo. According to preliminary information, the cause of the outage may have been a cyberattack, although there is no official confirmation yet. The large-scale blackout caused chaos in major cities, stopping transport and disrupting mobile communications, which increased panic among residents.

According to Publico, the Lisbon metro has come to a complete standstill, while residents of the Algarve and Coimbra have reported power and internet outages. In Spain, according to El Mundo, outages have affected Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Valencia, Seville and Pamplona. Madrid-Barajas Airport has stopped operating, and the Madrid and Barcelona metros have been evacuated through tunnels.

Local blackouts were recorded in Burgundy (France) and residential areas of Belgium and the Netherlands. Andorra was left completely without power, Vanguardia reported.

Spanish grid operator Red Electrica recorded a sharp drop in power consumption from 25 MW to 184 MW at around 12:425 p.m. local time, indicating a system failure. The company is working with distribution networks to restore power, but the exact cause has not been determined. Spain's national railway company RENFE reported that trains were stopped across the country due to a power outage.

Portugal's Minister of Territorial Development Manuel Castro Almeida said the scale of the incident was "comparable to a cyberattack," although he stressed that this was unconfirmed information. Spain's National Institute for Cybersecurity (INCIBE) has launched an investigation into the possible cyberattack, but no conclusions have been reached yet.

The blackout had serious consequences: traffic lights stopped working, paralyzing roads, and shops and payment systems were unavailable. In Portugal, according to Expresso, the operator E-Redes linked the failure to a problem in the European power grid. In Madeira, sirens went off in some establishments, and in Lisbon and Porto, the metro remained closed. In Madrid, the Madrid Open tennis tournament was suspended, the BBC reported.

The governments of Spain and Portugal have called emergency meetings. In Madrid, authorities are coordinating through Moncloa, while France and Belgium are on high alert. Experts interviewed by Cadena SER do not rule out that the outage could have been caused by a technical malfunction, but the cyberattack version is dominant due to the synchronicity of the outages in several countries.