Electricity blackout on 28 April: Walmeric's impact and response

On 28 April, a massive electricity blackout left a large part of the Spanish mainland and Portugal without power supply. According to Red Eléctrica Española, the incident was triggered at 12:32 pm by a sudden loss of more than 15,000 MW, 60% of the available capacity, which led to the automatic disconnection of the Spanish electricity system from the European grid. The blackout severely affected essential services such as public transport, telecommunications and internet access, among others. Recovery was uneven across the country, with areas restoring power within a few hours and others suffering outages for more than 24 hours.

Although these types of situations are beyond our control, Walmeric would like to provide clarity on what happened and explain how our technology infrastructure responded to the situation.

During the incident, our services remained active. We have backup power systems and generators that ensured continuity of service, even in adverse conditions.

The impact was mainly focused on the temporary disruption of external communications, which limited access to our systems by some customers. Our system, designed to detect incidents and trigger action protocols, was also affected as it relied on external connectivity. However, recovery was immediate once connections were re-established.

Our system experienced a partial downtime of approximately three hours. Although services continued to operate, there was a significant decrease in traffic, as telephony was the main affected service. This caused micro outages and instability that lasted for more than 24 hours, impacting not only our environment, but also numerous sectors and platforms across the peninsula.

We are aware that some customers may have experienced impacts during this period, so we believe it is essential to share this information. As part of our commitment to continuous improvement, we have analysed all identified failures in detail and are implementing measures to strengthen our infrastructure so that, in the event of any future contingencies, the response will be up to expectations and the effects on the user experience will be minimised as much as possible.