The Day a Whole Peninsula Went Offline
What it's like when 58 million people face analogue life together...
I've spent more time than I’d like to admit wondering what would happen if the national grid failed. Full digital blackout. I pictured us all frolicking like feudal maidens, braiding daisy chains into one another’s hair while cybertrucks in the far distance exploded, making a polite sort of “poof” sound. Nature heals. Literacy soars. I somehow obtain a pet deer. It was all very idyllic.
Yesterday, when the entire Iberian peninsula was plunged into a total power cut, I realised just how precariously our lives perch on the back of a blinking modem.
It began with a sense of mundane obliviousness. I was working from home that morning when the Wi-Fi dropped. Not ideal, but not unusual. I opened the Wi-Fi menu to see that not only was our network gone, but so was everyone else’s. A digital ghost town. Maybe the building had tripped a fuse?
Grateful to avoid the Sisyphian task of work emails, I wandered out onto the balcony to draft a piece by hand. My neighbours did the same, blinking at each other in mute confusion, popping out one by one like meerkats on a mound.
“Is your phone working?” my boyfriend asked, appearing beside me, squinting at his screen. “It says I have 4G but nothing’s going through.”
Out on the other balconies, the same conversation seemed to be happening. People held their phones up frowning. This is when we realised we couldn’t hear any traffic at all, even in the distance. Only a faraway persistent siren, like that of an ambulance.
Then, a sudden, synchronised eruption of pings, buzzes and beeps. Everyone’s phones went off at the same time in one last gasp of 4G connectivity. My boyfriend looked up from his screen in shock.
“I just heard from my friend in Mallorca. It’s the entire peninsula.”
Then, a blast of car horns.
We shared a look of wide-eyed apocalypse-movie alarm and scurried down into the street. All the traffic lights had gone out. Drivers had descended into pure instinct and formed a honking gridlock. Huge crowds flocked every single bus stop. This is when we realised that the metro must’ve stopped.
As it turns out, the underground trains halted mid-trip during the power cut, leaving commuters trapped underground. High-rise cleaners were stuck dangling from scaffolding. Office professionals were caught in lifts. People who used electronic keycards to access their buildings were locked out on the street.
A man cycled the wrong way down a bike lane shouting doomsday pronouncements while freshly-liberated office workers pooled into the streets. There was an atmosphere of quiet bafflement on this hot spring day. For the thousands of people whose job relied on Wi-Fi, this was now a bank holiday. Nobody announced it, but what else was there to do?
Embracing our sudden freedom, we decided to head home for a leisurely lunch, just to hit our first hurdle. The electric stove. It had joined the rebellion along with its accomplices: the microwave, the oven, and worst of all the fridge. We didn’t trust raw meat to survive in a dead fridge in this heat. Instead, we stuffed what perishable goods we could into a bag and trekked over to the flat of my boyfriend’s old high school friends. They had gas.
By then, the streets had settled into the aimless collective confusion I remember from the Covid-19 pandemic. In the park, people draped across ping-pong tables, fanning themselves with books. Café staff who couldn’t roll down their electric shutters just gave up and joined the customers for a drink. I saw someone ask a stranger for directions instead of checking Google maps.
With no doorbells working, the streets were speckled with people shouting up to their friends’ windows like Romeo. We followed suit. Luckily, our hosts appeared on the balcony and chucked their house keys down.
The rest of the afternoon passed in a haze of pleasantly aimless activity. A sun-dazed analogue stupor. We pooled our resources (they opened a nice bottle of champagne they’d been saving and I, hero that I am, generously contributed 3 warm beers). We played games, pulled weeds and read books to the sound of acoustic guitar. I even wrote some poems. Boredom, it seems, breeds creativity.
Across the city, my friends were up to similar mischief. They plotted trips to Georgia (the country), tried to cook pasta with tea lights, read books they’d been “midway through” since Christmas. My old flatmate threw a small party with people in his building that he’d never spoken to before. Apparently all it took for us to talk to our neighbours was the total collapse of digital infrastructure.
Eventually, I even stopped reaching for my phone. Not because I’d spiritually transcended technology – it was just dead. To my surprise, it only took a few hours to kill the reach-for-your-screen impulse. The muscle memory faded. We went for a walk and I didn’t think to pop it into my handbag. What was I going to use it for, to reflect sunlight at my friends’ windows?
On the streets, buskers took instruments out and played for dancing pedestrians in a scene straight from a French yogurt ad. In one eyeful, there were more people reading out in the sun than I’d ever seen before (three). This was as close to my pastoral fantasy as I could get.
But not everyone was having a poetic little staycation. The city was split clean down the middle. While we were reading books and pulling weeds like Marie Antoinette, some aquarium intern was probably trying to save their tropical fish with a ladle. Some jobs can’t stop.
Many stores stayed open, with workers chained to their shift and unable to close the storefront shutters without electricity. You could see bored cashiers slumped over counters in the dark. Kebab joints and corner shops stayed open by candlelight. There were no CCTV cameras, no card machines, no electric shawarma knives.
The atmosphere was different on our walk home. Instead of the soft yellow of streetlights, the roads were black, occasionally washed red by a passing motorbike. People trudged home with the weak lights of their phone torches. Cars drove slowly to avoid casualties. When we got to the flat, we lit all the candles we owned and debated whether we were brave enough to try an ice-cold shower. I wrote the first draft of this piece squinting in the light of a votive candle, eating a kebab we paid for in coins.
It’s easy, in the moment, to romanticise unplugging. There’s something fun about feeling resourceful and serene while the world around you short-circuits. But that feeling rests on the unspoken assumption that the world will plug itself back in again soon. We knew that the grid would be back, ready for us to hop right back on it like a tourist bus. Our unplugged afternoon was only delightful because it came with a return ticket.
For some, though, there is no “back to normal.” Nationwide power cuts are relatively common in large parts of the world. My family are from Sri Lanka, an island famous for power outages. Just this year the nation’s grid was entirely destabilised by a single monkey.
While a one-off blackout didn’t tip hospitals into full apocalypse mode (thank you, dear generators), the real trouble starts when the outages are common and long. Research labs lose samples in thawed freezers. Farms can’t irrigate. Electric fences go down, leaving cows dangerously emboldened. In tropical countries, where air conditioning is the only thing standing between you and becoming soup, power cuts are a frequent and destabilising fact of life.
“The most annoying thing about Sri Lankan power cuts,” says my dad, who wears T-shirts in the British snow, “is the lack of fans.”
Our power flickered back on at midnight. I was already asleep because I wanted to experience blowing out a candle and falling instantly to sleep like a cartoon, hopefully to go honk mimimimi and produce little Zs. My friends told me what happened.
They were sitting in the dark when they heard a cheer. A street near them got their power back, lighting up like a spotlight. The cheering rolled down the block like a wave at a football match until, finally, it was their turn. The 21st century came flooding back in.
When the power’s flowing, it’s easy for me to forget how much of our world depends on fragile electronic systems. Things like refrigerated medicine, ATMs, or train signalling. I would love to live in a world that can run without electricity. This week’s outage has given me a wakeup call and signalled some things I need to change.
Yesterday I couldn’t stop thinking about my neighbour. He’s a friendly old man I chat with sometimes in the lift. I had no idea how he’d cope in a blackout – did he rely on a medical alert system? If he needed food, how would he deal with all the stairs now that our lift was jammed? Our building’s huge and I don’t know where he lives. The main thing this emergency taught me is that I should know more about my neighbours so we’re better equipped to help each other in a crisis.
“It may be an anomaly but I think the lesson is to stay prepared for things like this,” said my dad, my unofficial blackout expert (he’s been preparing for the end of the world since 1983). “Have some cash ready in the house. Canned food, water, some way to communicate without the internet.”
To copy my dad’s take, I think the challenge isn’t to reject technology altogether but to create a world where we can unplug safely when we need to. If we want a frolicking maiden fantasy, we’ll need to build stronger stronger systems of self-sufficiency, both as households and as communities. In the meantime I’ll charge my power bank, keep some cash in the drawer, and brace myself for the next time the lights go out, just in case that Sri Lankan monkey learns to swim.
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Thanks for reading! If the idea of living in a blackout freaks you out, I urge you to donate to Gaza, where this is a daily reality. Here’s a link to the Operation Olive Branch spreadsheet of charities. If that’s overwhelming, my pick is the PCRF, where it takes under 1 minute to donate or even set up a monthly donation. This charity focuses on children.
Also I had to clench my fists so hard to stop myself naming this “All Quiet on the Iberian Front”.
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the way you write is so captivating. love this piece!