Spain's power almost totally restored

The origin of the massive outage on Monday is as yet unknown, and it is likely to be some time before it can be established what happened.

Government sources both in Spain and Portugal have ruled out a cyberattack. Michael Hogan, senior advisor to the Regulatory Assistance Project, an international team of experts for the energy sector, said on the BBC on Tuesday morning that an outage on this scale, where the system collapses very quickly, is usually caused by a major transmission failure, followed then by generation shutting itself down in order to protect the system.

He added that somewhere along the chain, someone is likely to have done something they shouldn't have done, so an element of human error cannot be ruled out. Hogan felt that Red Eléctrica had done "a pretty amazing job" getting power restored as quickly as it has, as it is a "very delicate operation" getting the system back to life.

Mallorca and the Balearics didn't suffer any power cuts. This was thanks to the autonomous supply; there is an internal grid. The Canaries were likewise unaffected for the same reason.

However, telecommunications were affected. Internet and phone systems do appear to now be functioning normally.