Spain, France and Portugal hit by Europe's largest power cut
Although the cause of one of Europe's largest blackouts has yet to be established, some senior officials have blamed it on a cyberattack.
Hospitals were forced to use emergency generators and the Spanish government urged motorists to stay off the roads after traffic controls went down in the country shortly after noon local time.
All three countries are investigating the cause of the blackout.
Juan Manuel Moreno, the president of the regional government of the Spanish region of Andalucia, said: 'Everything points to a blackout of this magnitude only being due to a cyberattack.'
Credit: Georgina Wray for The Telegraph
The senior politician in Spain's opposition centre-Right Popular Party said he had not received confirmation from the federal government in Madrid and had reached his conclusion 'solely based on our own data'.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the president of the regional government of Madrid, called on Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, to trigger the highest level emergency plan.
'We ask the national government to activate Plan 3 so that the Army can maintain order if necessary,' Ms Ayuso said.
The Madrid Open tennis competition was abandoned. Jacob Fearnley, the British tennis player, was forced to leave the clay court, after scoreboards and a camera above the court were affected.
The city's metro was evacuated with photos of passengers stumbling through dark tunnels of the underground network appearing online.
Credit: X/@varuky_
Mobile networks have also been hit, with reception either patchy or non-existent in areas. In Madrid and Barcelona, people were seen heading into the streets, holding their smartphones up to try to connect to a network.
The Portuguese Cabinet convened an emergency meeting and Mr Sánchez visited power distributor Red Eléctrica to follow efforts at restoring grid operations.
Red Eléctrica says restoring power to large parts of the country could take six to10 hours. The company declined to speculate on the causes of the blackout.
It said it was recovering power in the north and south of the peninsula, which would help to progressively restore the electricity supply nationwide.
Kathy Diaz Romero, from Sant Celoni, a small town in Catalonia, said residents had not been told what was going on.
'There's no traffic lights, no trains, no subways. They still haven't said anything about why it happened,' she said. 'It's coming back on slowly in my town but there's still lots of places without power at all.'
Trevor Court, who lives in Lloret de Mar near Barcelona, said: 'My power went off at 12.30pm. At first I thought it was a substation. But friends in Barcelona and Zaragoza messaged to say they had no electricity.
'Most places are electric. So now they have no way to cook, have a hot drink or charge their phone, or buy food as some supermarkets and shops have closed, or get petrol as pumps are out. Or charge EV's.'
Europe's biggest outage to date was in 2003, when 56 million people in Italy and parts of Switzerland were left without electricity for up to 12 hours.
With the whole of Spain reportedly without power, as well as swathes of southern France and Portugal, Monday's cuts could surpass the 2003 incident in terms of the number of people affected.
The largest power cut in history was in India in 2012 when 700 million people, roughly 10 per cent of the world's population at the time, were left without electricity.
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