FRANCE AFFECTED
Transport chaos also gripped Spain’s second city, Barcelona, where locals and tourists alike flooded the streets in an attempt to find out what had happened.
Student Laia Montserrat had to leave her school when the lights went out.
“As the internet wasn’t coming back, they told us to go home … (but) there weren’t trains either,” she told AFP. “Now we don’t know what to do.”
The internet activity monitoring site Netblocks told AFP the blackout caused a “loss of much of the country’s digital infrastructure”. It said web connections plunged to just 17 per cent of normal usage.
Spain’s El Pais newspaper reported that hospitals used back-up generators to keep critical wards going, but some units were left without power.
Massive blackouts have affected other countries around the world in recent years.
Huge outages struck Tunisia in September 2023, Sri Lanka in August 2020, and Argentina and Uruguay in June 2019. In July 2012, India experienced a vast blackout.
In Europe, in November 2006, 10 million people were left without power for an hour in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain. That was caused by a failure in Germany’s grid.
