Spain’s Blackout

A Wake-Up Call We’ll Probably Ignore

“We're evacuating. Now”, said Hugo, our IT chief, barging into my office. His anxiety was palpable. Sweat trickled down his forehead. “It looks like a cyberattack—across Spain, Portugal, parts of France. Generators won't last. You have to leave immediately.”

Hugo’s panic was contagious, though I pride myself on staying calm under pressure. Outside, our students mirrored my outward stoicism. Evacuation protocols kicked in smoothly enough, but no one seemed eager to leave. They lingered—chatting, smoking, frantically tapping dead smartphones, desperately attempting to reassure loved ones or glean a scrap of news.

But stepping beyond campus boundaries felt uncannily like walking into a “Black Mirror” episode. Streets teemed with disoriented crowds, each individual seemingly caught off guard by what a full-scale blackout actually entailed. Admittedly, myself included. Real-life crises, it turns out, rarely follow Hollywood scripts.

Without power, the fabric of urban life frayed rapidly. Metro stations shuttered abruptly. Buses overflowed, dangerously crammed with frantic commuters. Cash machines froze, effectively paralyzing taxis and public transport reliant on electronic payments. Cafés couldn’t process credit cards, denying even the comfort of waiting things out over a cortado, ironically highlighting our privileged indignation when minor conveniences vanish. (Note to self: always carry cash.)

Going home? Without Google Maps, you might as well have been trying to navigate a labyrinth blindfolded. Like most people, I just walked, vaguely following a direction that felt right. After several wrong turns and two very helpful police officers (apparently still blessed with Internet access), I made it home. Three and a half hours later.

My confusion quickly deepened into frustration. First, if this truly was a cyberattack—and no one was saying it was or wasn’t at that point—how could one of NATO's key military powers collapse so swiftly, without warning or immediate remedy? Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez admitted, somewhat cryptically, that the exact causes remained unclear, and some international outlets talked about a “rare atmospheric phenomenon”. But the bigger question was left hanging, unanswered: how could a modern European country be this unprepared? Hospitals running on generators, emergency services interrupted—and a government that could offer little more than platitudes.

Second, and equally troubling: why did recovery take nearly six hours (and that's only half the country), an eternity in crisis management terms? A government proclaiming itself the world's envy must surely have contingency plans for blackouts, cyber-induced or otherwise. Yet here we were, helpless spectators to systemic paralysis reminiscent of Valencia's devastating floods—a sobering lesson in institutional fragility.

Then, amid my exasperation, an unsettling thought surfaced: perhaps this blackout served a necessary wake-up call. Because for a few precious hours, we, the privileged, caught an infinitely diluted glimpse of the instability that millions endure every single day. What we felt—disorientation, fear, powerlessness—pales into nothingness compared to the daily lives of Ukrainians sheltering under missile strikes, or Gazan children whose existence is reduced to grim numbers in news tickers. We got a taste. They live it.

And all this while the unhinged President of the United States—an increasingly inexplicable political anomaly—juggles tense diplomacy with his “good buddies” Putin and Netanyahu. Irony doesn’t get darker: the self-appointed guardians of moral order seem disturbingly incompetent, indifferent, or both.

Will anything change? I doubt it. The electricity buzzed back to life eventually. Screens flickered on. Cafés reopened. Taxis resumed prowling the streets. Normality reasserted itself, smug and unbothered.

That’s the real tragedy. Spain, Europe, the world—we’ve become so good at forgetting. So good at pretending that fragility doesn’t live right under the surface. That the world we’ve built isn’t one natural disaster, one hacking collective, one bad decision away from crumbling.

We’ll forget this, too. We always do.