The outage of electricity in Spain and Portugal was not caused by cyber attacks, Ree and the Portuguese government said.
The cause of Monday’s extensive power outage in Spain and Portugal was not a cyber attack, and on Tuesday the Spanish energy company Red Eléctrica de España (REE) and the Portuguese government declared. In most of the territory of both countries, electricity supplies were renewed early on Tuesday morning, TASR reports, according to AFP and Reuters reports.
“Based on the analysis we have been able to do so far, we can exclude a cyber security incident in the facilities,” said Ree Eduardo Prieto, director of Ree Eduardo. “There was no type of disruption in Red Eléctric’s management systems that could cause this incident,” he added.
The outage is not an attack
“In Portugal, we have no information related to cyber attacks or hostile acts at this stage,” said government spokesman António Leitão Amaro for CNN Portugal. “It seems that there has been a problem in the network for energy transfer in Spain,” he added.
Public life slowly returned to normal on Tuesday in Spain and Portugal. Public transport was renewed and schools, hospitals or offices were reopened.
Millions of people on the Pyrenean Peninsula were affected on Monday and paralyzed key sectors such as transport or telecommunications. It also briefly hit the southwest of France, but according to the local industry Minister Marc Ferracci, the impact of the failure was “minimal”.
Spain is one of the largest renewable energy producers in Europe. Monday’s outage caused a discussion about the vulnerability and instability of solar or wind energy. Energy expert John Kemp told Reuters that the clear causes of the failure can be detected by investigators until several months. “This region has one of the highest share of electricity generation from renewable sources in the world, so a failure will be a case study (on reliability) of renewable sources as well as their re -triggering after a major failure,” Kemp said.
