Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal
88 comments
·May 5, 2025Funes-
seszett
They misunderstood "one or two-hour lunch anywhere between 1pm to 5pm" for "4-hour lunch from 1pm to 5pm". Same with France, people have a 1-hour lunch either from 12 to 1pm or from 1pm to 2pm, rarely a 2-hour lunch.
bluesmoon
Thanks for the feedback. It's more correct to say that traffic drops off for 3-4 hours rather than everyone goes offline for 3-4 hours. It's likely to be staggered based on the slope of the curve at that point.
Symbiote
Also, Germany is 13° east of Spain. That's almost 1 hour worth, 1 hour would be 15°.
There's a misconception that Spanish people are 'lazy' for their late lunches, but they're eating lunch at roughly the same local solar time.
snkzxbs
You are missing the fact that a lot of people in Spain, maybe the majority, do what’s called a “jornada partida”, which means that businesses close at around 1-2 pm and then reopen at around 5-6 pm. During that time people generally have lunch and maybe sleep.
Especially during the hotter months, the streets are practically empty.
dcrazy
This seemed to me to vary by region. It was near universal when I visited Andalucía, including in Sevilla. It was uncommon in Madrid, and I don’t remember encountering it at all in Barcelona.
ergl
Jornada partida doesn't tend to apply to office workers and white collar work in general. It's common to see it in small shops, but it's in steep decline even in those areas.
dagw
Is that actually still a big thing? I've worked on several projects with people in Spain, and none of them did that. Lunch was never more than an hour, and basically everybody was back from lunch and working by 2.30 at the latest.
bluesmoon
That's a fair criticism. The data suggests that there are different breaks spread out over that 3-4 hour period, not one break of 3-4 hours. I've reworded it accordingly.
dcrazy
It’s accurate for business hours in at least some parts of the country, but it is paired with late closing. Even office workers will be on the job until 8. Popular wisdom attributes it to Franco’s adoption of Central European Time to be aligned with Hitler.
kranke155
The siesta essentially does not exist in a lot of workplaces in Spain anyway.
echelon
> Lunch breaks are [...] two hours long in Spain
Wow.
codetrotter
> some information services were still able to stay online and available
I’m in Valencia, Spain.
The mobile internet connectivity here during the power outage was very unstable.
Cellular phone signal strength was also very very low for the majority of the time.
Even sending SMS or WhatsApp messages would not work most of the day, because of just how unusable mobile connection was for me and my girlfriend and our families here.
And I only managed to load news pages, national or foreign, a few times during the hours of outage, to try and get some information on what cause, how widespread, and how long it would probably take to restore power.
On the plus side I did get to try my little solar panel for the first time to try and charge one of my power banks using solar power. And it did seem to get some juice out of it.
The biggest problems of all from my pov was:
- We live on the 8th floor with a 1 year-old baby. Going 8 floors of stairs with the stroller was not fun.
- All my money is electronic, except from one 50 euro bill I had in my wallet. How was I going to pay for water and food if this outage would go on.
- What’s going on? How bad is it? How long is it going to last? Very unstable mobile internet as mentioned.
In the end we ended up staying outside going for a walk and meeting up with my mother a bit and then me and my girlfriend and our baby going to the beach and sitting there until late. Finally when we came home lights were starting to come back on. And the elevator was working again too!
The next day the first thing I did was walk to the nearest ATM and withdraw several hundred euros, and I bought a bunch of water. We don’t have a car, so I used one of my big bags with wheels to be able to bring more water home than usual.
sillyfluke
> All my money is electronic
Yes, one positive aspect of these types of events is that the hazing against the cash-first minority worldwide has ebbed slightly. Sweden seems to be backtracking from their cashless push due to the threat of Russian cyberattacks as well.
In related news, high-speed trains appear to have been sabotaged in Spain today, causing transportation chaos again. This happened while they have not been able to conclusively determine the cause of the blackout.
The plot thickens...or gets sidetracked, depending on what the truth turns out to be.
makeitdouble
> hazing against the cash-first minority
That's...a pretty strong opinion.
Otherwise cash will still have it's issue during a blackout. For instance I'm not sure most shops would operate their POS during a blackout or without any connectivity, at least if there is any hope of resuming normal operations within days, it would screw the ledgers. ATMs of course are dead. Vending machines are also probably not ready for that (Japan has emergency ready ones, I can't imagine other countries doing that)
We're already in a world where cash is second class citizen, and it won't just get back to the "good old days" because of a temporary outage.
And it will also be a different story altogether if power/internet never comes back. Having cash stashed somewhere might not help you that much.
bombcar
It's interesting and informative to watch how different places handle power failures (which where I am in the USA are not common but not entirely rare, either).
Most of the bars keep serving to cash customers, and use paper to make notes for future bookkeeping. Some even start using paper tabs.
Big companies switch to backup generators (Walmart) or immediately cease business (also Walmart, because the card communication failed).
Some smaller ones had no lights to continue to be safe inside, so chased everyone out.
Other ones had enough windows and kept selling on a cash basis, making notes by hand. Some of these could open the cash drawer others couldn't, but made do with what they could.
coldpie
> That's...a pretty strong opinion.
If you're a person who uses cash a lot, the comments you hear do start to feel a bit like hazing. You very often hear jokes like "who uses cash anymore?" both directed at you and not, like you're a crazy person for preferring not to support Visa's advertising empire with a ~1-3% tithe on every purchase.
sillyfluke
>That's...a pretty strong opinion.
I'll go out on a limb and say it's only a strong opinion for anyone who isn't familiar with trying to use cash exclusively for all physical transcations under 1000 dollars in their day-to-day lives.
In London, they have tube stations with a single coffee stand on the platform that's card-only. It's a fucking outrage in my humble opinion. and just another form of debanking, pure and simple.
cft
The cause is the frequency drop that was not compensated by the inertia of rotating turbines due to increasing use of photovoltaics. See https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1916893181876326868?t=32a... A high level engineer in a Spanish generation plant confirmed this to me.
cesarb
> The cause is the frequency drop that was not compensated by the inertia of rotating turbines due to increasing use of photovoltaics.
But what caused the frequency drop? Large-scale grids are designed and operated in such a manner that any single fault, even one which causes a frequency drop (like a generator or a power line getting disconnected), will not cause a blackout. Which means: if there isn't enough inertia to compensate the frequency drop caused by a single fault anywhere in the grid, the system operator will either order photovoltaics and wind turbines to reduce their generation to a safer level, or order traditional rotating generators to operate as synchronous condensers (which adds inertia without adding generation).
Which means that either there was a double fault (two faults close enough in time that there wasn't enough time to reconfigure the system to a safer state before the second fault), or that the modeling of how the photovoltaics and wind turbines would react to a single fault was incorrect (for instance, expecting them to stay connected for longer on that level of frequency drop). My personal guess is that we're going to see a repeat of what happened here in Brazil in 2023, as I explained in another comment on an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43821801), where a single fault was enough to destabilize the system because the inverters in wind and solar power plants disconnected earlier than expected.
otherme123
Nobody knows the cause at the moment. All that we have are guesses and FUD. Even "high level engineers" don't know for sure what happened.
MisterTea
> - What’s going on? How bad is it? How long is it going to last? Very unstable mobile internet as mentioned.
Silly question but do you have AM or FM radio? When the lights went out in the northeast blackout of 2003 we turned to our cars to put on AM radio. Even after Hurricane Sandy my mother was without power for 3 weeks and she was running a battery powered radio.
I shudder to think of a future where moving information requires high performance digital electronics vs. a crystal radio set.
codetrotter
It’s a very valid question.
I don’t have one currently. But I did hear later that others were using radio to get news.
Thank you for bringing it up again. I’m gonna buy a small battery powered radio :)
prof-dr-ir
> The next day the first thing I did was walk to the nearest ATM and withdraw several hundred euros, and I bought a bunch of water.
That is a very good idea for everyone. Putting together an emergency supplies kit is what various European governments, and now also the European Commission, are beginning to officially recommend:
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/26/brussels-ask-e...
> What’s going on? How bad is it? How long is it going to last?
I think some governments suggest that people buy a battery-powered or hand crank radio to address exactly this issue.
mjevans
Many of these also have small solar panels. Enough to recharge the device and sometimes build up a charge for other devices like a tablet or cell phone. It wouldn't be enough to continuously run that greedy screen, but it would be enough to maintain standby radio contact.
gus_massa
> And I only managed to load news pages,
Did you try with HN? I remember a long time ago I was in a hotel with bad connectivity, and one of the few sites that loaded was HN (no images, almost no JS, ...). I was able to read the comments, but it was difficult to read most of the articles.
rightbyte
> And I only managed to load news pages, national or foreign, a few times during the hours of outage
I think this is a problem with https. I remember intermittent connectivity as way better before Google forced the issue.
And yes I like https. But it comes with drawbacks. E.g. no isp caching.
blahaj
I don't think ISP caching would be a thing without https. It would bring a lot of additional complexity and resource requirements for them. I can hardly imagine that being worth it to save some bandwidth. Maybe it made sense in a world where bandwidth was very limited.
Also I am very happy that it is not a thing and that ISPs cannot do that. When I go to a website I want to get the website from the webserver exactly as the server delivers it and not some other page that my ISP thinks is how the website should look.
Besides with global CDNs we have something very similar but better anyway. I don't get the site from the other side of the world but from the closest CDN server that does caching. The important difference is that the CDN server is authorized by the website to cache the page and the webmaster has control over what it does.
cesarb
> I don't think ISP caching would be a thing without https. It would bring a lot of additional complexity and resource requirements for them. I can hardly imagine that being worth it to save some bandwidth. Maybe it made sense in a world where bandwidth was very limited.
Transparent squid proxies were common back when most sites were on http. They let ISPs reduce the use of their limited upstream bandwidth, while also making sites load faster. The complexity and resource requirements were modest: install squid on a server, and configure the router to redirect (masquerade) all outgoing TCP port 80 connections to the port configured for squid on that server.
bluesmoon
Thank you for your personal story about this. It helps to put things in perspective.
briandear
I'm in Barcelona (Sabadell specifically,) and the cellular networks were down. Luckily I have a generator and Starlink.
amelius
Curious if anyone was able to use their Meshtastic radio to contact anyone.
imhoguy
Isn't Starlink using country-local ground stations for the Internet connectivity? Likely they had power-backup but could it switch to foreign country stations?
genewitch
They have lasers on the satellites so they can relay to another ground station. I "come out" in either Dallas or Georgia somewhere. Once I exited in Wyoming or thereabouts.
giorgioz
I was in Spain during the blackout nearby Valencia. My phone had 3G data connectivity from 12:30 to 18:30 despite the outage. Same for the fiber signal, powering the modem&router with batteries allowed me to a working fiber connection for 4 hours. Some neighbors with different mobile operators told me they did not have signal. It might be some operator had backup diesel generator that lasted 4 hours.
pmontra
Not only the backup generator of that base station but the backup power of all the network hardware up to it. The base station could have outlasted some other parts that run out of diesel before it did and yet it did not have connectivity.
dagi3d
>Spaniards have a later lunch, starting around 1pm, and going on until 4 or 5pm. This could possibly be due to the tradition of afternoon siesta.
It's "funny" how someone that is supposed to be so smart, can be so ignorant at the same time
wink
Or bad at interpreting data?
Of course not all Germans go for lunch at 12-1 but unless you are in retail or your team has decided 1-2 is better, or 30min is enough.. I think it's just a very good guess that it's 12-1 for most the people. If it was a real 50:50 split between 12-1 or 1-2 then it could look like a 2h break. Unsure, I can't read their data properly.
TrianguloY
I work on the University, and there I recovered wired internet rather quickly probably due to backup generators. At home most routers stopped, some even took until the next day to be functional again.
As for mobile connectivity, the main issue was the congestion. The cell network didn't fail, usually, but in most places either your phone wasn't able to connect or had no internet. Too many people trying at the same time, I guess. On the University on the other hand it worked perfectly. Maybe because it's a usual crowded place and there are more resources, but I think it was also because a lot of students (even teachers) went home, so those who stayed were mostly alone with a good internet...but less people to talk to.
myself248
It's one thing to have traffic data, presumably connected from some internet point or something, idk, I just assume that everything's monitored somewhere.
But how do they know users' phone battery level?
scary-size
That one threw me off as well! As the other commentators mentioned: "Navigator.getBattery" in browsers is the culprit. "Luckily" it's not supported in Safari and Firefox.
littlecranky67
> But how do they know users' phone battery level?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/g...
sillyfluke
I'm curious what was the situation with Spaniards and Portuguese people roaming elsewhere in the EU with their local phones, since roaming phones are usually patched through the home country telecoms. Did their experience differ significantly compared to their compatriots?
whitehexagon
We awoke to power the next day, but mobile phone services only returned some hours later. Amazing how busy the banks were with people desperately seeking cash. Unfortunately the banks dont handle cash here now, and the ATMs were all offline.
The first few hours were scary, due to complete lack of information. I am not sure how people had internet access, seemed like all networks were down here. I dont follow any news (apart from HN) but from what people are saying locally, the cause is still unknown, which I guess means it can happen again at any time.
Any recommendations from preppers on a suitable portable radio? It would be nice next time to be able to distinguish rare draughty power line issues from possible start of WWIII.
genewitch
You want a portable shortwave radio with external antenna. Amazon shows them ~$30 which is about what they cost. If you get a fancy one they go 3-4 times as expensive. I have a radio shack grundig battery powered one and it works fine.
Look at reviews, I guess, or try and find an old grundig. I'm sure other people have other brands/models.
If I can remember the last decent one I was looking at I'll comment again, but hopefully this will set you on the right track.
onionisafruit
> there were no visits to these [government food safety] sites at any time prior to this event for the several weeks that I looked at the data
That’s crazy that their usage is that low. Not even one visitor?
null
wkat4242
Be aware that internet usage was pretty much impossible. Landline internet dropped soon after the outage even for those with UPS systems.
And 5G internet was completely unusable during the outage. All 3 major networks immediately switched to "Emergency calls only" status and allowed zero data. So doing analysis on it isn't very useful because most people had no access and only small packets made it through (favouring more simple services). It worked maybe 10 minutes every couple of hours and very limited.
I have an Iridium backup for emergency calls too. But no internet. And was thinking of getting Starlink but I don't want it anymore since musk going nazi and also the Spanish Government seems to have dropped a 9€ per month surcharge on it.
NooneAtAll3
why do phones leak battery percentage to the internet?
>Germans take a 1 hour lunch from 12-1pm. Spaniards have a later lunch, starting around 1pm, and going on until 4 or 5pm. This could possibly be due to the tradition of afternoon siesta.
This is not only untrue, but I would argue it also borders on being defamatory, consciously or not. Lunch breaks are typically one to two hours long in Spain, not three to four hours long--that's ridiculous. What the author is describing there would better fit what we tend to do during weekends, where "sobremesa" (coffee and drinks after we're done with the main dishes) can admittedly get a bit out of hand, but absolutely not on working days.