Iberian Blackout Highlights Gaps in Telecom Network Resiliency
Power backups, route diversity, and planning critical to ISPs who fared better than rivals in April’s outage.
August 21, 2025 – When the Iberian Peninsula plunged into darkness on April 28, 2025, the consequences rippled far beyond the power grid.
The blackout, which cut electricity for about ten hours across Portugal and Spain, knocked out large swaths of mobile and fixed networks almost instantly.
Yet outcomes varied sharply: Portuguese operator MEO, which had invested heavily in backup batteries and redundancy, managed to keep large parts of its network running, while another operator saw more than 90 percent of its subscribers lose service for over 24 hours.
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