Power started returning to parts of the Iberian peninsula late on Monday after a huge outage brought most of Spain and Portugal to a standstill, grounding planes, halting public transport, and forcing hospitals to suspend routine operations.

The effects of a major power cut across Spain, Portugal and beyond are still being felt a day after the lights went out. Traffic lights switched off, trains stopped, and airports went dark in several cities, including Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville in Spain and Lisbon, Santarém and Porto in Portugal, following the outage around midday Monday.

Spain and Portugal were the most impacted by the power cut, with ‘large areas’ experiencing outages. That included the cities of Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Porto, Valencia, Seville and Bilbao. Andorra and parts of France were also briefly affected, however French grid operator RTE has said the network was operating again by Monday afternoon.