Portugal | Pakistan

Lights flickered back to life in Spain and Portugal on Tuesday after a massive blackout hit the Iberian peninsula stranding passengers in trains and hundreds of elevators while millions saw phone and internet coverage die. Electricity had been restored to more than 90 per cent of mainland Spain early on Tuesday, the REE power operator said. Lights came on again in Madrid and in Portugal’s capital. Barely a corner of the peninsula, which has a joint population of almost 60 million people, escaped the blackout. But no firm cause for the shutdown has yet emerged, though wild rumours spread on messaging networks about cyber attacks. Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro said the source of the outage was “probably in Spain”. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said “all the potential causes” were being analysed and warned the public “not to speculate” because of the risk of “misinformation”. Sanchez said about 15,000 megawatts of electricity, more than half of the power being consumed at the time, “suddenly d...