More than 170,000 homes were left without power in Paris on Thursday after a blackout caused widespread power outages.
Electricity grid operator Enedis said metro and suburban train lines were halted as the blackout hit at around 6.38am local time, with operators working to restore power in affected areas.
The grid operator did not specify the reasons for the blackout.
RTE, which manages France's high-voltage electricity transmissions, wrote on X that 112,000 homes in the city were reconnected within five minutes. All of the homes in the Paris region had been restored by 9am local time.
Authorities said that the blackout was caused by a technical issue at an electrical substation in Issy-les-Moulineaux, to the southwest of the city at 5.38am.
Last April, Spain and Portugal were brought to a standstill by major power outages which hit vast areas across both countries.
Traffic was gridlocked, flights grounded and trains suspended while people were trapped in elevators and left without water supplies. Whole cities were cut off with mobile networks, Wi-Fi, ATMs and card machines inoperative during the disruption.
Spain’s capital, Madrid, as well as major cities like Barcelona and Valencia, were also affected. Spanish power grid operator Red Electrica said the massive blackout had affected the Iberian Peninsula.
Parts of Madrid’s underground were brought to a halt and traffic lights across the capital city stopped working. Portuguese police said traffic lights were affected across the country and the metro was closed in Lisbon and Porto.
Social media footage from Malaga, on Spain’s south coast, also showed metro passengers forced to walk inside the tunnel as carriages were evacuated.
In Portugal, a country of 10.6 million people, the outage hit the capital, Lisbon, and surrounding areas, as well as northern and southern parts of the country.
At the time, Portuguese grid operator REN suggested a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” caused by “extreme temperature” changes in Spain’s interior was behind the outage.
