> 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.
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.
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.
It is not at all certain that there was any sabotage. Supposedly it was sabotage because important wires were stolen, but wire has been stolen by criminals for decades to sell for the materials. And for the last few years there has been an increase of delays, breakdowns and failures in the whole railway network. It is far more likely that common theft on a decaying system caused the problems, but that would pin the blame on the government for this decay. As such they prefer to blame anyone else, including shadowy enemies sabotaging the country.
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.
> - 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.
My Android cell phone has a FM radio app that was pre-installed at the factory. It requires the use of wired headphones to act as an antenna, but otherwise works fine.
> 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:
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.
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.
In Sweden we all get this. Saying you should have water, food, radio and cash and more so maybe Spain or EU needs this too :) Now do I have this, no. But we are further.
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.
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?
It’s wild how different experiences can be of the same thing - we didn’t even realise anything was amiss until we went to pick our kid up from kindergarten, and everyone was stood around on the streets looking a bit lost.
We live off grid - independent power supply, starlink, no cell reception in our valley, EV charged off the panels. Just another day.
Worryingly, after about four hours of power cut the local town had already run out of water (they pump up to a relatively small (100m3) holding tank), so we donated our stash in the car to the kindergarten for the kids staying later.
No run on the banks here though - we are super rural and pretty much everyone keeps wads of cash (land deals etc. are almost always done with the official bit and the under the table bit) and has a full pantry at home.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But they do? At least near us? Shops close from 1 ‘til 4, and are then open until 9pm. Some businesses like mechanics too - although offices tend to stick to the more widespread 9-5, with more lunch from 12:30 to 14:00.
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.
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.
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?
In my case, 2G/3G connections with a power outage from 12:30 PM to 14:20 PM in Bilbao. Calls barely worked and for the internet, being a doomed nerd I've juse used Lagrange under Android with Gopher and Gemini proxies to the web (News Waffle) in order to read the newspapers because our media outlets didn even fit the sites for the low bandwith, something North Americans are greatly doing with https://text.npr.org and https://lite.cnn.io
Some people even bought FM radio receivers en masse; because they work with batteries and the stations and repeaters are already set to use emergency generators.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
https://rib.msb.se/filer/pdf/30874.pdf
EU has started this a bit, we are waking up. EVROPA.
https://www.dw.com/en/european-union-response-disasters-war-...
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.
https://meshtastic.org/
We live off grid - independent power supply, starlink, no cell reception in our valley, EV charged off the panels. Just another day.
Worryingly, after about four hours of power cut the local town had already run out of water (they pump up to a relatively small (100m3) holding tank), so we donated our stash in the car to the kindergarten for the kids staying later.
No run on the banks here though - we are super rural and pretty much everyone keeps wads of cash (land deals etc. are almost always done with the official bit and the under the table bit) and has a full pantry at home.
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.
It's "funny" how someone that is supposed to be so smart, can be so ignorant at the same time
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.
But how do they know users' phone battery level?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/g...
Some people even bought FM radio receivers en masse; because they work with batteries and the stations and repeaters are already set to use emergency generators.
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.