For millions of people across Spain and Portugal, power was lost in an instant yesterday. Communications came to a halt, water was not running in places, metro systems ground to a standstill, and travellers were strained in airport departure lounges.

Electricity was back in most of the two countries almost 18 hours after a blackout that shut down much of daily life. The cause of the outage remained unclear.

A massive power cut hit large parts of Spain and Portugal on Monday, causing widespread chaos and disruption. The outage left millions of people without electricity, while internet and phone networks were also down. Trains were cancelled and evacuated in some regions, traffic lights stopped working amid mounting delays at airports.