The Blackout

By: Elián Zidan

What happened in Spain, Portugal, and southern France wasn’t just a power outage—it was a jolt. A harsh reminder of just how fragile the infrastructure is that keeps our modern lives running. In a matter of seconds, three European countries were nearly cut off from the rest of the world.

Airports shut down, trains stalled in the middle of nowhere, schools closed, traffic lights went dark, communications collapsed—and in the chaos, only old-school transistor radios kept working. It felt like the plot of a dystopian film. But it wasn’t. It was southern Europe, in 2025.

Some experts blame a sudden frequency fluctuation in the power grid. Others point to a domino effect caused by an overreliance on renewable energy without adequate backup. And then there’s what’s buzzing online: the possibility of a cyberattack. While the search for culprits or technical explanations continues, one fact remains— for hours, the Iberian Peninsula was offline.

Which begs the question: How prepared are we, really?

Because this time it was Europe—with all its tech, its development, its resources—that went dark. This wasn’t a neighborhood losing power. This was an entire region unplugged. Hospitals had to rely on backup generators, towns were left cut off, and cities became suddenly, painfully vulnerable.

In Latin America, power outages are part of daily life. But when they happen in Europe, the world reacts differently. It becomes a global headline. It’s analyzed as an unprecedented disaster. Because over there, these things aren’t supposed to happen.

But this blackout was a wake-up call—a warning about just how deeply dependent we are on electricity. About how little we can do without power, without connection, without a grid. We live in an interconnected world that doesn’t just rely on electricity—it’s built on it. And yet, we have no real plan for when it fails.

This needs to be a turning point. We must reinforce our systems, diversify our energy sources, and—perhaps most importantly—develop contingency plans that go beyond simply hoping it doesn’t happen again.

Because if we don’t learn from this, the next blackout might leave us in the dark in ways we’re not ready for.