Barcelona, 28 April

A major power outage hit Spain and Portugal on Monday, including their capitals, knocking out subway networks, phone lines, traffic lights and ATM machines.

It is rare to have such a widespread outage there. Spanish generator Red Eléctrica said it affected the Iberian peninsula and the incident is being assessed.

The countries have a combined population of more than 50 million people. It was not immediately clear how many were affected.

Spain's public broadcaster RTVE said a major power outage hit several regions of the country just after midday local time, leaving its newsroom, Spain's parliament in Madrid and subway stations across the country in the dark.

A graph on Spain's electricity network website showing demand across the country indicated a steep drop around 12.15 pm from 27,500MW to near 15,000MW.

A couple of hours later, Spain's electricity network operator said it was recovering power in the north and south of the peninsula, which would help to progressively restore the electricity supply nationwide.

In Portugal, a country of some 10.6 million people, the outage hit the capital, Lisbon, and surrounding areas, as well as northern and southern parts of the country.

Portugal's government said the incident appeared to stem from problems outside the country, an official told national news agency Lusa.

“It looks like it was a problem with the distribution network, apparently in Spain. It's still being ascertained,” Cabinet Minister Leitão Amaro was quoted as saying.

Portuguese distributor E-Redes said the outage was due to “a problem with the European electricity system,” according to Portuguese newspaper Expresso. The company said it was compelled to cut power in specific areas to stabilise the network, according to Expresso.

E-Redes said parts of France also were affected.

Several Lisbon subway cars were evacuated, reports said. Also in Portugal, courts stopped work and ATMs and electronic payment systems were affected. Traffic lights in Lisbon stopped working.

It was not possible to make calls on mobile phone networks, though some apps were working.