Spain-Portugal energy outage stay: Cyberattack being investigated as potential blackout trigger by Madrid court docket | EUROtoday

The Madrid Open tennis match resumed after the unexplained blackout brought about 22 matches to be postponed on Monday.

A packed schedule on Tuesday included second-ranked Iga Swiatek advancing to the quarter-finals.

There was no energy on the Caja Magica tennis complicated that’s internet hosting the Madrid Open till Tuesday.

Jacob Fearnley, a qualifier on the Madrid Open, had been mounting a final stand in opposition to Grigor Dimitrov when the lights went off mid-play. Both gamers have been despatched off court docket after the lights went darkish.

Spectators have been requested to depart the sports activities complicated and the organisers stated video games have been known as off “to guarantee the safety of the players, fans and personnel”.

Many gamers stated they used the time to replicate and calm down because the batteries of their telephones died.

World No 6 Jack Draper stated he was “actually enjoying” the time to “focus on what is important.”

“I’m a bit of a minimalist,” he stated. “Everyone was panicking, but it was so nice to actually have no phone and none of the other (stuff) going on in the world, and just try and focus on what is important. I ended up reading 10 pages of a book. Usually I don’t read at all, so it was interesting.”

Alex Lopez was one in all dozens of individuals ready in an extended line on the ATM inside Hospital Clínic, a medical centres in Barcelona.

“Hospitals are one of the few places where the power grid is still working, and we want to get cash just in case,” Mr Lopez stated. “I had a doctor’s appointment, so we took advantage of it.”

The lights have been nonetheless working within the constructing, with mills protecting the ability flowing. People gathered on the doorways to make use of the hospital’s open Wi-Fi community, with chaos unfolding outdoors after the ability went out round noon. The metro stopped working, 600 folks needed to be rescued from lifts throughout the area of Catalonia and site visitors lights stopped working. Cars have been additionally unable to replenish with petrol, with pumps down or funds not with the ability to undergo.

Downing Street has dismissed strategies {that a} reliance on renewable energy was behind outages in Spain and Portugal, after Kemi Badenoch stated it was more likely to be the trigger.

A No 10 spokesperson rejected “unfounded claims, and speculation” after the Conservative Party chief stated the UK’s web zero plans might result in home blackouts.

Mrs Badenoch stated she had heard “different theories” about what occurred in Spain and Portugal.

“Some have said that it’s cyber terrorism, but the more likely issue is the grid – that when you have an electricity supply that’s reliant on renewables, you need a lot of battery storage.

“And very often, what we’re seeing is renewables working forward of the storage services, which implies that when you might have surges a technique or one other, you find yourself with blackouts.

“And this is one of the reasons why I’ve been saying that the net zero plans we have are not thought through.

“That we’re speeding forward with out having the best infrastructure in place and truly doing issues that would find yourself bankrupting the nation or creating blackouts.”

She scrapped her party’s commitment to net zero by 2050 in a U-turn last month, saying it would be impossible to reach.

A No 10 spokesman said it is too early to confirm the cause of the incident and defended the government’s energy transition plans.

“In phrases of the claims of reliance on web zero power leaving nations affected weak to energy cuts, these are unfounded claims, and hypothesis at this stage,” he stated.

Switching to clean energy offers security and a supply of electricity that fossil fuels cannot provide, he added.

“We’ve empowered the nationwide power system operator to hold out resilience features throughout electrical energy and gasoline methods, and we’ll proceed to work with business and regulators to enhance and keep the resilience of previous, new and future power infrastructure,” he said.

Energy secretary Ed Miliband warned earlier not to “leap to conclusions about what occurred” and said he had been in touch with the UK’s National Energy System Operator (Neso) after the outages in Spain and Portugal.

Portugal has requested that an EU agency independently audit the power outage which hit the Iberian peninsula the day before;

Acting prime minister Luis Montenegro said his government has asked for the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators to perform an independent audit of the outage.

“We need a full investigation of the outage’s causes. We want fast, pressing solutions,” Montenegro told a news briefing.

Telephone and internet services have been restored to remote communities in Greenland after the were cut off following the Spain blackout.

The remote areas suffered issues after crucial satellite access was cut out in far-away Spain, the Arctic island’s state-owned telecoms group Tusass said on Tuesday.

Tusass said it had lost connection to satellite equipment based in Spain that provides telephone, internet, TV and radio services.

“It’s due to an error some 3,000 km (1,900 miles) away,” a Tusass spokesperson told Reuters, adding that connection had been restored overnight.

In 2023, Tusass selected the Maspalomas ground station in Spain’s Gran Canaria island off the west coast of Africa as the hub for its new satellite network which provides a critical lifeline for some of Greenland’s most isolated communities.

The UK has been looking at how to deal with “different kinds of challenges and threats”, the home secretary has said, after the major power outage in Spain and Portugal.

Asked whether the power cut there had triggered a fear that British infrastructure could be affected in the same way, Yvette Cooper told Sky News that the UK has a “continued approach” to “resilience” and “security issues”.

She added: “We’ve been looking, as part of wider security reviews across the country, how we deal with both resilience and also different kinds of challenges and threats.

“Some of which can be the traditional security challenges, some of which can be the kinds of resilience – things that we’re talking about in Spain and Portugal – and we obviously support them and the governments there in the work that they’re doing.”

The Independent’s travel correspondent Simon Calder reports:

After the power outage around noon on Monday 28 April hobbled airports, airlines and air-traffic control systems in Spain and Portugal, the final flight cancellation count has just been announced by aviation analysts Cirium.

Passengers travelling to, from and within Spain encountered 413 cancellations, while the score for Portugal is 372. But because many of those are links between the two countries, and are therefore “double counted,” The Independent believes the true total is around 500 – affecting an estimated 80,000 passengers.

The worst affected airport was Lisbon, with 45 per cent of departures grounded. Next was Seville, where one-third of departing flights were cancelled. In absolute terms, though, Madrid and Barcelona were the Spanish cities with the highest number of cancellations – around 50 at each.

The Independent’s assistant editor Vicki Harper speaks with Lisbon residents following yesterday’s blackouts:

Raquel, 48 said: “People have been going utterly loopy, however you already know when the ability got here on at 11pm, I didn’t even really feel like my telephone. I do know there could be a flood of messages. I fairly appreciated the enjoyable quiet for a change.”

Lara and Miguel additionally stay in downtown Rio de Mouro: “From now on we definitely will be getting together a basic survival kit.”