This morning, at around 11.30 a.m., from the north to the south of Portugal, and in various parts of Spain, France, Italy and Greece (among others), there was a general blackout, affecting the daily lives of millions of Portuguese and Europeans.
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.
The latest information we received (with the system still down) was that this situation was due to a critical fault in the French high-voltage network that started with a fire in the south-west of France, which forced the very high-voltage line between Perpignan and Narbonne to be disconnected.
However, this data needs to be factually confirmed, as it was distributed when there was still little information circulating about the real reasons for this huge, collective European blackout.
At 8.30 p.m., the time we are publishing this story, there is already more information about the general blackout, the most important of which is that electricity is gradually being restored throughout the country.
(News update)