SPAIN has declared a national emergency after today's widespread power outage.
Airports and hospitals shut down and trains screeched to a halt across the peninsula - with officials blaming a "rare atmospheric phenomenon".
Panic-stricken shoppers across Spain and even Portugal are clearing supermarket shelves and leaving grocery stores empty amid chaos.
Alarming pictures posted on social media show bare supermarket shelves after panic-shopping swept across the affected regions.
Footage shows people forming huge queues outside grocery stores and ATMs to stockpile essential items amid fears the mayhem could last for days.
And there are fears that thugs will exploit the chaos and darkness to loot shops after nightfall.
One shopper Alfonso Romay wrote on X: “It’s incredible, the collective paranoia. The power goes out for five hours, and look at the supermarket.
“The water jugs in the image lasted less than one minute.”
Roads in Spain, Portugal and parts of France were left snarled up with traffic as lights and signals went blank - with emergency officers drafted in to tackle the bedlam.
Some hospitals cancelled all surgeries for Monday amid fears for patient safety in the region's most severe blackout for years.
Spain's train service came to a complete stop, leaving huge crowds stranded at stations, and Madrid's underground network was evacuated.
But Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez confirmed that power has been restored in some areas of the north and south of Spain.
Air traffic was slashed to "half capacity" as flights were cancelled from a number of airports - with Lisbon cancelling all arrivals for hours.
And a major tennis tournament, the Madrid Open, had to be suspended, with Brit Jacob Fearnley's match interrupted by a huge "bang".
Data from Spain's electricity grid shows an enormous drop-off in supply over a matter of seconds, just after midday.
Michael Dearson-Jones from Ibiza told The Sun: "The mobile networks are down in Ibiza since late afternoon. Power is on, but limited access to the internet.
"No calls, texts or mobile internet. Landline internet is working, but intermittently."
Jessica Ratcliffe from the Canary Islands - a popular Brit tourist hotspot - told The Sun: "An alert has been issued to residents in the Canary Islands that basic food supply shipments from the mainland will be impacted, causing panic buying there too.
"There has also been a failure in the internet, mobile phones, data phones and ATMs.
"Businesses and freelancers on the islands warn of restrictions on card payment and problems withdrawing cash."
Portugal's national grid operator, REN, said it believes a "rare atmospheric event" could be behind the outage.
It said that extreme temperature variations in Spain possibly led to surges in current and then system failures, in a process called "induced atmospheric variation".
They added that it could take up to a week to fully solve the issue given its complexity.
Red Eléctrica, Spain's national grid operator, has not given an explanation for the blackout but vowed that "all resources are being dedicated" to solving the issue.
As of 3pm, it said power had been restored to several electricity stations in the north, south and east.
Spain's prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s rushed to the operator's HQ to monitor the response himself.
Many had raised fears that a "Russian cyberattack" is behind the chaos, following previous similar plots against Europe.
Juanma Moreno, president of the Andalusian regional government, had said a cyber attack is the most likely cause of the disruption - and claimed that everything pointed towards a deliberate plot.
He added that hospitals would only be able to rely on their generators for 24 hours.
An outage of this scale is extremely rare and has caused mayhem for millions, including Brits on their holidays.
Melanie Halsall is on the last day of a padel trip with six pals to Vale de Lobo, southern Portugal, and can't get back into the hotel room.
She told The Sun: "We were on a walk when suddenly everything went out.
"It's like being in the Netflix drama Zero Day. We believe it is a cyber attack."
Brit Lottie Feist, 23, studying translation at uni in Lisbon, Portugal, told The Sun: “There is no electricity, nothing is working. The roads are absolute carnage as no traffic lights are working.
"All the power is down. It's terrifying, people will be stuck in elevators, and everything has completely shut down.
In Spain, officials urged drivers to stay off the roads, and the Valenciametro announced it had suspended its entire service.
Thousands of traffic lights are down in Barcelona, with drivers negotiating complicated junctions without any help.
Healthcare workers in Madrid said they have been forced to prioritise the transfer of chronically ill patients on oxygen machines - some of whom cannot survive more than an hour without a supply.
Hospitals are having to rely on their emergency generators to keep people alive.
Huge queues grew at ATMs as debit card payments were down, so people rushed to get cash out.
Portuguese supermarkets closed for "safety reasons", and some gasstations were restricting their supply.
Civilians also got trapped in various spaces - including lifts at a Madridstation and the carriages of Lisbon Metro.
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