Lessons for IT leaders from Monday’s massive European blackout

The massive power outage that is impacting much of Spain and Portugal, and that left parts of France without electricity, is remarkable both for its speed and also its reach, an industry analyst said Monday.

The outage began around 12:30 p.m. Spanish time (6:30 a.m. Eastern time), Computerworld Spain reported, with power slowly beginning to return in some regions from around 1.30pm.

John Annand, practice lead at Info-Tech Research Group, said from what he has seen online so far, at this time, “both [Spanish power distributor] Red Eléctrica de España and REN [the entity responsible for maintaining Portugal’s electrical grid] have said that the failure happened at the 400 kV backbone that ties the Iberian grid to the rest of continental Europe.”

There is, he said, “some speculation that the cause may have been an ‘extremely rare atmospheric phenomenon’ or a fire on a French transmission line, but it seems officials have also not ruled out anything cyber so far. This is interesting, because the first two potential causes are physical, and the third one is digital. Our modern grids today live in both realms … and are very vulnerable in both.”

“For tech leaders, the lesson isn’t the exotic cause, but the cascade that follows it,” Annand said. “Europe has been shifting towards weather-dependent renewables, and its grid is moving away from the comforting spin of gigantic turbines.”

Now, he said, “it has to lean harder on software, SCADA links, and inverter controls. These systems are definitely improving, but the will to fund those upgrades typically spikes only after a high-visibility failure, like the one we’re seeing now.”

While enterprises may not be able to harden a transmission backbone, Annand said that “they can close their own resilience gaps and take on responsible business continuity planning. With greater and greater demand (because of things like AI), there’s less slack in the national/international systems to provide redundancy in the event of an outage.”

He added, “if an IT leader can’t trust their vendor (even their power vendor), then it’s up to them to ensure they take steps to close their own resilience gaps. They can check that their generators have enough fuel for more than a day, that their cloud architectures can fail over to outside regions, and that their telecom providers offer extended battery or satellite back-up for last-mile links.”

“The gap between national infrastructure incidents and corporate downtime is just one flicker of the lights,” Annand said, “and the time to patch that gap is before the next rare event, not after.”