Last week, Spain and Portugal suffered their worst power outage in history. Spanish national grid operator Red Electrica ruled out a cyberattack, and linked the loss of power to incidents involving solar power plants in southwestern Spain that caused instability in the power grid. The outages ultimately caused problems not only in Spain, but also in France and Portugal, according to Datacenter Dynamics.
The data center industry has handled the blackout surprisingly well, however. There are 156 data centers in Spain and another 41 in Portugal. The region is home to both local players and hyperscalers like AWS, Meta✴, and Microsoft.
Most operators have managed to cope with the problem. For example, Equinix reported that its data centers in Spain and Portugal remained fully operational during the outage, with backup systems operating as expected. Iron Mountain also reported that its data centers operated without interruption, and newcomer Start Campus said that stability was maintained throughout the period.
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Barcelona Cable Landing Station also reported that its cable service and customer workloads were unaffected, Nabiax said its data center in Spain had no issues, and NTT said its MAD1 facility in Madrid was able to switch to a UPS and then to backup power. Data4, which also operates in Madrid, also said its customers were unaffected, stressing the importance of building a robust digital infrastructure.
The Nixval data center in Valencia said operations were unaffected, although some customers had their phones out and had to come to the data center in person to check on the situation. Global Switch stressed that it was proud of how its infrastructure performed, while Edged also said its infrastructure was unaffected. Data center provider Walhalla, however, noted that coordination between authorities and energy suppliers was “zero.”
The problems in the telecom sector were much more serious, with internet services in Spain, Portugal and beyond suffering. For example, according to Cloudflare, traffic in Portugal dropped by more than 50%, and later by 90%. Something similar was observed in Spain (60% compared to the previous week immediately and by 80% in the next five hours, respectively). Wireless operators had to turn on backup generators where they were available. Even Starlink suffered to some extent. Although the connection was not interrupted, traffic was sent along bypass routes due to the shutdown of some ground stations.