How the April 28, 2025, power outage in Portugal and Spain impacted Internet traffic and connectivity
A massive power outage struck significant portions of Portugal and Spain at 10:34 UTC on April 28, grinding transportation to a halt, shutting retail businesses, and otherwise disrupting everyday activities and services. Parts of France were also reportedly impacted by the power outage. Portugal’s electrical grid operator blamed the outage on a "fault in the Spanish electricity grid”, and later stated that "due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kilovolts), a phenomenon known as 'induced atmospheric vibration'" and that "These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network." However, the operator later denied these claims.
The breadth of Cloudflare’s network and our customer base provides us with a unique perspective on Internet resilience, enabling us to observe the Internet impact of this power outage at both a local and national level, as well as at a network level, across traffic, network quality, and routing metrics.
In Portugal, Internet traffic dropped as the power grid failed, with traffic immediately dropping by half as compared to the Continue reading
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