On the morning of April 28, 2025, at around 11:30 a.m., from the north to the south of Portugal, and in several areas of Spain , a general blackout was recorded, affecting the daily lives of millions of Portuguese and Spaniards.
According to SIC Notícias, the website of e-Redes, the company responsible for energy distribution in Portugal, was down, which made everyone even more worried about the blackout.
Mobile communications systems and Internet access were also experiencing problems, particularly applications such as WhatsApp, which experienced several connection breakdowns during this period and was even unavailable for much of the afternoon, making contact with friends and family desperate.
Similarly, banking systems, transport, traffic lights and many other services that we normally use every day were unavailable for long hours, with only radio stations remaining active, even with some constraints when it came to accessing information and reporting from abroad.
At the time, the last information we received (with the system still down) was that this situation had occurred due to a critical fault in the French high-voltage network that began with a fire in the south-west of France, which forced the very high-voltage line between Perpignan and Narbonne to be disconnected. But as we now know, it had nothing to do with that.
The report says
The Spanish Electricity Network (REE) confirmed only yesterday, June 19, 2025, that the historic blackout that left Portugal and Spain in the dark was due to the malfunction of a photovoltaic plant located in Badajoz, very close to our country.
The report also indicates that the incident was caused by a combination of factors, from faults in voltage regulation to operational errors, but highlights the anomalous behavior of the solar plant, which experienced sudden changes in power, a situation that happens very rarely in installations of this type.
According to Público, the name of the company responsible for the plant has not been revealed for reasons of privacy protection under Spanish law.