Yesterday and today, the whole of Spain, Portugal and parts of France, and possibly as per some reports, parts of Italy and Belgium lost their power inexplicably. Italy and Belgium reports might have been spurious. This happened about 12:30 local time here in Spain.

The power was out for about 14 hours here, a bit less for some areas as they brought up the grid piece by piece.

The mobile base stations were the first to go.

We have solar panels and batteries which carry over the night, and it was a sunny day, so we maintained power here in the house over the event.

This Mastodon instance was inaccessible for 11 hours, because apparently the fiber optic substations lost their emergency battery power after 6 hours or so, and the final internet connection we had was cut.

There is still no conclusive determination for what happened or why. It seems the most likely explanation currently is some sort of an atmospheric event causing resonance in the electric grid.

elpais.com/economia/2025-04-28…

At night, our house was pretty much the only one with power. The other lights visible in the photo are largely cars and flashlights. We still have our Christmas lights in the yard...

The stars were well visible in the sky.

So, lessons learned:
1. Apocalypses (or pseudo-apocalypses) don't necessarily come with a bang. They come with an eery silence and darkness, and no one knows what is happening.
2. I am still unable to play my local Plex series with the good TV, because everything seems to require internet connectivity for no good reasons. I can play them with my phone and on laptop (but with proprietary codecs and without hardware accelerations it's in practice impossible). Playstation Plex simply refuses to function without internet.
3. Don't run multiple high power cooking appliances at once because it overloads the inverter.
4. The house water pump isn't in the emergency power circuit, which is inconvenient and needs fixing.
5. Need to have physical keys for things easily available, and not hidden in places you'd look in the last.
6. Even if the local internet networks would still work, if the global networks aren't available the ISPs happily just cut off all the networks and don't even try to maintain just local networks for convenient local emergency communications purposes. Ditto for electricity.

#SelfHosting #RukiiNet #apocalypse #resilience #blackout #Spain