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Incident

Iberian Peninsula blackout

28 April 2025Continental Spain and PortugalFell to tier 3: analog fallbackPower Connectivity & data Devices Cascades

A grid collapse cut power to continental Spain and Portugal for about ten hours. Hospitals largely held on generators; care outside them did not.

Sources checked when written 26 September 2026

TierGrid power lost nationally; in Portugal hospitals had limited generator capacity and triaged equipment, and EMS lost communications. How tiers are assigned.

What happened

At 12:33 CEST cascading generator disconnections blacked out continental Spain and Portugal. Major Spanish hospitals kept ICUs, wards and active surgery running on generators, with no generator failures reported by those consulted, but suspended outpatient clinics and non-urgent surgery; scanners needed restart procedures and some lab analyzers and prescribing/records systems failed. In Portugal, a perspective by clinicians and officials reports hospitals on limited generator capacity, triaged equipment, inaccessible digital records and cold-chain failures. EMS lost communications and faced fuel shortages. Home device users were at acute risk; at least one death from ventilator failure is reported. A Nature Communications study estimated about 167 excess deaths in Spain over the following two days (95% credible interval 28 to 300), with no comparable signal in Portugal.[1,2,3,4,5]

Documented harm

Estimated +167 excess deaths in Spain (95% CrI +28 to +300), mainly women 85+; at least one home-ventilator death; eight directly attributed fatalities. In-hospital harm not documented in the sources reviewed.

What it teaches

  • Hospitals that pass on generators still lose labs, imaging restarts, records and phones.
  • The highest-risk patients during a blackout may be at home, not in the hospital.
  • Plan for EMS and telecoms failing at the same moment as power.

Sources

  1. Final Report on the Grid Incident in Spain and Portugal on 28 April 2025. ENTSO-E Expert Panel, 20 March 2026. Primary Official report · link checked 2026-09-26
  2. La resaca en los hospitales tras salvar el apagón: 'Más allá de cierto caos, hemos sobrevivido bastante bien'. elDiario.es (Sofía Pérez Mendoza), 29 April 2025. Secondary Journalism · link checked 2026-09-26
  3. When the lights went out: impacts of the April 2025 Iberian blackout on the Portuguese National Health Service sovereignty. Frontiers in Public Health, 2025. Primary Peer-reviewed · link checked 2026-09-26
  4. Blackout in Spain: Urgent Analysis of Impact on Emergency Medical Services. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine, December 2025. Primary Peer-reviewed · link checked 2026-09-26
  5. Excess mortality attributable to the 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout. Nature Communications, July 2026. Primary Peer-reviewed · link checked 2026-09-26

All incidents · Power · Connectivity & data · Devices · Cascades

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