Personal Story: A Blackout's Impact on Digital Experiences

On April 28th, 2025, my family arrived in Portugal for a one-week holiday. We cleared border control while the region fell into darkness due to a blackout that took down the Spanish and Portuguese electrical grids.  

Ten years ago, my pockets would have been loaded with local currency, directions printed out, and a taxi reserved to take my family to the hotel. Digital transformation has changed that. Today, I use Uber to get to the Airbnb, where we message the host electronically on the app to coordinate access. We use a digital wallet or handheld credit card terminals to pay for goods, and our plans are hosted in the cloud on a Google Doc.   

Last week, our saving grace was 60 euros of coins my 8-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter found in a jar before we left.   They had claimed this as their spending money for the trip, but I quickly commandeered it as our family food fund.   Even with the coin in our pocket, our society's reliance on power meant grocery stores' electronic register systems were down, restaurants were shut as they had no lights to run the kitchen, and only local convenience stores remained open.  With a cell phone light in hand, we moved through the dark stores looking for bread and peanut butter.

This experience has highlighted companies' massive investment in digital transformation and the lack of investment in resilient systems. Technology architectures exist to ride out a 12-hour blackout with at least basic systems running, keeping lights on, ATMs running, and the internet accessible.  Instead, the Lights were out, ATMS were down, and the phone and internet networks were dead. 

Reuters estimates 1.6 billion in losses in Spain alone., From what I can tell, this does not account for the lack of productivity, as workers simply could not work without access to the internet. 

In the end, this experience shows how a blackout can take a society to a screeching stop due to the reliance on digital experiences and the electricity that powers them.  We can quickly see how a longer outage would have created a more severe outcome that can easily be avoided with the technology we have at hand.  As companies continue to shift to digital, they should take a second look at their continuity plans for this type of scenario. This IBERA blackout may have been the first blackout of this scale, but I am sure it will not be the last.