Offline and Unprepared in Spain: My 23-Hour Blackout Experience
The electronic gate was dead and unresponsive. A sign of what was about to unfold during the unexpected blackout in Spain. I jabbed the remote again and again, as if repetition would revive it. Nothing. I reached for my phone to call my husband, but also nothing. 'Emergency Calls Only' blinked, sneering at me. I tried WhatsApp, Messenger, email, anything. My lifeline to my husband had vanished. One moment I had the comfort of instant digital connection, and the next, it was as if someone had yanked away my umbilical cord. This wasn’t just a power cut, this was the start of the Spain power outage that left millions offline, unprepared, and uncertain. This is my story.
I was jolted to the present as a car pulled up behind me and gave a sharp toot of the horn. I edged over and stepped out, frustration simmering. At least the doorbell still worked, and so did Hector’s bark, summoning my husband to the gate, to help me lug the shopping through the rusty inner gate.
At first, we assumed it was just another outage locally. This is rural Spain, after all and short power cuts are as common as stray dogs and cats, and something we’d reluctantly grown used to. We busied ourselves with a few chores, then decided to make the most of the unexpected offline time by heading back to the shops for a few bits I had forgotten. But as soon as we arrived, the atmosphere told us that this was bigger. No one had mains electricity. No one had data. Conversations were low and laced with unease. My husband stumbled over some products in the gloomy shop just as it dawned on me that we couldn’t pay by card. A tiny wave of relief washed over me as I remembered the crumpled notes in my purse. Cash, for once, was king.
Back in the car, I lit up with excitement “I’ve got data!”. I rushed to update one of our daughters who had already messaged to check we were OK. As I hit send, a news article flashed up that Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France had all been hit. My stomach dropped. And just like that, the connection vanished again. We were cut off. No news, no updates, and no way to reassure our family.
We stopped at a local bar and spoke to someone who understood the updates via their car radio. Word was spreading: the outage could last at least 10 hours. There was murmuring about a possible cyber-attack, and the list of affected countries matched the article I’d glimpsed before the signal vanished. That’s when my amusement faded. That’s when the gravity hit me. And that’s when I made a firm mental note: get an FM radio and soon.
I sat with a glass of wine in hand, staring blankly ahead as confusion crept in. Without Google, without AI, I felt suddenly and profoundly stupid. As if my brain had been outsourced for so long, I couldn’t dig deep enough in my brain to get the answers I needed to understand this situation.
Just how could so many countries become affected at the same time?
Who or what would be behind all this?
Then empathy hit. What about those up in the air right now? Can they land safely? The Gatwick incident sprang to mind, a reminder that many places aren’t remotely prepared for a sudden power outage. What about people stuck in city traffic, traffic lights down and chaos creeping in? Or those stranded on trains, with no water or air conditioning now the days are heating up? And the lifts. What about people trapped inside them? I’d been in one myself just 30 minutes earlier! What about businesses? How would online companies like my husband’s cope with everything dead and dark? The questions kept coming, one after the other, until they formed a queue of their own in my mind, and none of them had answers.
How would I stay in touch with my family back in the UK if this dragged on? Suddenly, I ached for the simplicity of the old-style, corded, non-electric phone. The satisfying clink picking up the receiver, head tilted, cord wrapped around my fingers as I chatted for hours. No signal bars, no apps, no batteries. Just a solid, dependable connection to the people I loved. Or am I being stupid again. Would that have been out of action too?
I seesawed from "this will all be resolved soon" to "what if this is like an electronic version of Covid and goes on for months?"
Talking it all through with my husband led to a few light-hearted moments. I joked, “It’s OK, I’ll just nuke something for dinner instead of using the oven!” Then paused, realising the microwave was as useless as everything else. I declared I’d write about it on my laptop… which, of course, wasn’t charged enough. Thank goodness for the ole faithful pen and paper!
Whilst writing my mind started spiralling into the long-term implications. No online banking. No way to withdraw from the ATM. No bricks-and-mortar banks left to walk into. How would we function without physical cash? Would our money still be there if or when we came back online? Maybe this was the reset so many had warned about, only now, it didn’t seem so far-fetched.
I was grateful for the humble gas hob, because at least we could boil some pasta for lunch. But more questions started bubbling too. Should we stock up on more gas bottles? Was this going to be another Covid-style scramble, grabbing what we could from wherever we could?
As an organised-control-freak-Capricorn, this was my worst nightmare. Once again, 5 years down the line, I was back out of control again.
No doubt governments were huddled in emergency meetings, monitoring the chaos, drafting statements, and spinning calm. But down here on the ground, in the silence of dead screens, with the sun fading and darkness creeping in, we went to bed with hopes that we would be reconnected in the morning, suspecting it wouldn’t be.
A Glitch in the System or a Glimpse of the Future? Spain’s blackout – Tuesday
As I lay awake, suddenly my mobile pinged at 3am, excited I reached over to be greeted with a taunting message “Your messages can’t be sent” Gutted and unable to fall back to sleep I finally got up.
On a bleary quest to find my headtorch, I stubbed my toe then set about finding a coffee mug, ending with me staring amused at the useless Dulce Gusto machine. I reached for the gas hob kettle. A mint tea would have to do.
I sat in the dark and sipped, thoughts racing. How long could this go on? Should I have planted more than one tomato plant from seed? Could we survive on chilli plants alone? Had I been using “we rent” as an excuse not to grow our own food?
I poured myself a glass of orange juice from the fridge to swallow my antihistamine, noting the carton was slightly cool, a quiet warning that time was ticking. I made a mental note to use the meat soon. How long does food really keep in a powerless fridge in Spain? Normally, I’d ask Google. Now? I was thinking about digging a hole in the garden to create one of nature’s larders when the next wave of anxiety rolled in.
What’s the point of a mobile phone if you can’t call or message anyone? What’s the point of cloud storage for all our documents and precious photos if we can’t access them when we need them most? Why this push for digital ID in Spain when we wouldn’t even be able to show it? In that moment, my TIE card, tucked in my purse, felt like the only card of real value that I owned.
If I couldn’t get online to work for my client, I’d lose income. But then again, what was the point if I couldn’t even access that money? Working at the Ferretería two mornings a week, what if they can’t open? If they could still open, then how on earth would I be understood without my translator apps? How could I help customers without the AI tools I normally rely on to compare products I know nothing about? My mind buzzed with questions I couldn’t answer. My brain was getting exhausted with all the mental calculations I was utterly ill-equipped to solve.
I found myself telepathically reaching out to everyone we had plans with over the next 24 hours. Hoping, if this continued, that no one would show up for the group walk the next day. I could remember the route, so, having no GPS was OK this time, but I didn’t want anyone wasting fuel when we had no clue what lay ahead. I didn’t want to be offline if there was a medical emergency. I’d been so organised and prepared for everything except this. I even made sure I had everyone’s email addresses in case Facebook ever kicked me off again, but what good was that now?
If nothing else, this whole mess had one unexpected upside. It kickstarted my writing again. Journalling my thoughts, fears, and frustrations helped me process the noise in my head. So, AI *laugh* Just how are you coping without power? Funny, really. I felt less threatened by AI as my own words poured out onto the paper, raw and unfiltered. A human's feelings, to a human's experience. But then, of course, my mind wandered into darker territory... What if AI was behind all this?
My thoughts drifted to our families at home. Had they been affected too? How were our girls coping if the UK had been hit as well? A new fear was unlocked. What exactly were they being told about the ‘attack’ on Spain? Were they sitting there, sick with worry about us, imagining the worst, while I couldn’t do a thing to reassure them? With false news flying around at the best of times, the idea that they might be caught in a storm of misinformation during this data and power lockdown made me feel helpless.
Those Instagrammers I used to quietly roll my eyes at, you know, the ones preaching about prepper pantries and shelves stacked high with tinned goods. Well, suddenly that didn’t seem so daft. They had supplies, they had systems, they had wireless radios and batteries, they had the means to protect themselves. And here I was, with a fridge of slowly warming leftovers. I felt a deeper pull toward something I’d often wanted but never fully committed to: a smallholding. A patch of land to grow our own food, live off-grid, and rely on only ourselves. The idea no longer felt extreme. It felt essential. I found myself feeling envious of those who already had the forethought and means to do just that.
I rationed the beam of my head torch and closed my eyes, willing the last hours to pass quickly until sunrise. But then a familiar inner voice I’ve learned not to ignore shouted “stock up on water”. I’d had this nudge too many times to brush it off. I opened my eyes again, padded into the kitchen, and filled some containers with filtered tap water. It didn’t do much to ease the anxiety, but at least I was doing something.
Before I knew it, the owls started to hoot, and the dawn chorus began. The sun wasn’t as bright, as if it knew it needed to reflect the mood. My husband woke and was amused by the stock of water, and asking why I was ‘panicking’. I reminded him of the dawn of Covid when I ‘panicked’ then. I simply take the “Better to have it and not need it” stance.
We decided to head out together and see if any shops were open on the way to my work. In one we queued behind others with the same idea to buy a radio. I didn’t care that it cost €22.50. I didn’t even check the brand. I just wanted information. But it turned out to be a waste of money. Sitting in the car, we tuned it on... one station. Just one. The voice we heard was in a torrent of rapid-fire Spanish. I sat there, frustrated, wishing, not for the first time, that we spoke the language better. The static from other channels fed my anxiety more. Why wasn’t more channels broadcasting?
We felt reasonably confident that the food in our cupboards would see the two of us through the coming week, so our focus shifted to bottled water, just in case the supply was cut off too. Ironically, we’d made the conscious switch from bottled water to filtered tap water to cut down on plastic and do our bit for the planet. And now, here we were, possibly having to rely on bottles again. I grabbed some dog food for Hector as he was running low and joined the queue for fuel. Thankfully, that station was still open and pumping. Not all of them were.
When I walked into work, it was quickly decided to send me home. The day was grey and threatening rain, and with barely any natural light filtering into the large store, there wasn’t much I’d be able to do anyway. Truthfully, I was relieved to head back during such uncertain times, but the reality lingered in the back of my mind of a shift missed. Another dip in income.
On the drive home my mind ricocheted between past worries, future what-ifs, and the uncertain now. What exactly was I supposed to do with the day ahead? The chores were already done. A day out exploring felt reckless; living rurally meant burning through fuel fast, and we still had no clue how long the outage would last. With no GPS and no way to contact anyone if something went wrong, even a simple walk felt risky. I considered painting, but my heart wasn’t in being creative. Scott sat reading outside while I drifted around the house, pottering, restless. I kept checking my phone every half hour, hoping for change, already knowing I wouldn’t find it.
Being forced to slow down and embrace it, felt entirely alien to me. I know it’s something we should do; I even advocate for it. But in truth? I’m terrible at it. I can’t lie in my hammock for more than fifteen minutes without leaping up to pull weeds or tick something off a to-do list that never seems to end.
And then, just as I was scribbling down more of my thoughts the power came back.
Moments later, data flickered to life, and messages began to trickle in.
The battery powered radio suddenly picked up channels.
Twenty-three hours of silence, worry, and reflection. But there was little worry apart from my own, and no real sense of the situation we had been in.
Continuing to look for answers of what happened I went on social media and found posts romanticising it all. Pictures of those in cities sipping wine by candlelight, laughing through a few hours of digital detox. I wanted to scream. I’d spent the past day in rural Spain, with no communications, genuinely worried for us, for the rest of the Country, for what this might mean globally. It hadn’t felt like a novelty to me. I wasn’t having fun. The last 23 hours had put my mind in a very scary place.
Power was humming and notifications pinging once more. The fridge was getting colder; the phone was charging. But the questions kept coming.
We were offline for ‘just’ 23 hours.
What would 72 hours feel like? A week?
What if this is just a gentle warning shot, not the main event?
What would we do if the lights went out and stayed out?
Are we too connected to cope without connection?
Outwardly, everyone else seemed to take it in their stride. Calm faces. Shrugs. The odd joke. But were they, like me, laughing it off on the surface. But like a duck paddling madly under water, trying to stay afloat in a world that suddenly felt far less stable?
Was I the only one that was worrying so much?
With short power surges since then, with each computer enforced shutdown, it feels like I am being reminded how much stability is a luxury we take for granted.
One thing I do know is this - Knowledge is power. When the power goes, you'd better hope you’ve got the knowledge.
Because if this was just a test.
I failed miserably. I want to pass next time.
Because something tells me, there will be a next time!
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