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20 May 2025, 09:47 | Updated: 20 May 2025, 11:12
All leading providers in Spain, including Movistar, Orange, Vodafone, Digimobil, and O2, are suffering from the outage.
Picture:
Getty
By Josef Al Shemary
All mobile phone networks have gone down across Spain, just four weeks after the country suffered nationwide blackouts.
All leading providers in Spain, including Movistar, Orange, Vodafone, Digimobil, and O2, are suffering from the outage.
Customers are unable to make calls, receive texts or use their mobile data as a result of the blackout, which started at around 5 am according to the website DownDetector.
It has spread through most of the country, with problems reported in all major cities including Madrid, Malaga, Barcelona, Valencia, Murcia, Seville, and Bilbao.
People across the country are reporting no signal, total blackout and internet issues.
People have been calling out their providers on social media because of the outage.
One user wrote: “Hi, @movistar_es, it’s already 9:10 a.m. Are you going to explain what’s going on? The network has gone down… again. You’ll see how they can issue the bill without any problems.”
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Others complained that they couldn’t work or study because of the internet blackout, and are asking their providers for support
The blackout has also affected emergency service phone lines, as the Europe-wide emergency number 112 became unreachable in parts of Spain.
The Valencia government has set up an alternative emergency service number to its 112 service, while the 112 service in Aragon alerted people on social media that “the 112 telephone line is inoperative," activating three alternative numbers.
Some companies were completely frozen out of their systems and couldn’t load their software or connect their computers.
The problem apparently came from a major glitch in Telefónica’s system, which is the operator for most of Spain’s mobile networks.
The multinational is the second largest company in Spain, and runs telecom operations in 18 countries, making it one of the largest telephone operators and mobile network providers in the world.
The telecom giant reportedly ran a network update that didn’t go to plan, and ended up causing a country-wide blackout for millions of Spanish residents.
A Telefónica spokesperson said: “We have done some network upgrade work which has affected some companies' fixed communication services (voice and internet).
"We are working on resolving this and some of the affected services have already been recovered, such as the 112 emergency services, which have now been re-established.”
It comes just weeks after a national incident was declared in Spain in late-April - La Palma and the Canary Islands had not been affected by any outages until now.
Dubbed the 2025 Iberian Peninsula Blackout, millions in Spain and Portugal were plunged into darkness for around 10 hours on April 28.
The Spanish government ruled out a cyber attack as the cause of the April blackout.
