A nationwide phone network went down in Spain early Tuesday, knocking out emergency lines in large parts of the country for several hours just weeks after an extensive power outage brought the country to a standstill.
Telefónica, one of Spain’s largest telecommunications providers, said a planned network upgrade had caused the outages. Landlines and internet services were hardest hit, and callers in several regions were unable to reach Spain’s national emergency number, 112.
“We have done some network upgrade work which has affected some companies’ fixed communication services,” Telefónica, said in an emailed statement, adding that it was working to restore full service.
With the network down early on Tuesday morning, emergency services in Valencia, Aragón and the Basque regions scrambled to post mobile numbers on social media as an alternative for callers. In Catalonia and Extremadura, the local authorities said its 112 services had been affected but that contingencies were in place. The government of Andalusia also said there was a nationwide issue with the 112 service, and that the emergency lines, but that lines were being restored.
By late morning, Telefónica and a minister said that all services had been restored. Óscar López, Spain’s minister for digital transformation, thanked the company for its efforts.
“We’ve been in contact with Telefónica from the very beginning, from the first hour, as they had recorded the incident,” he told a news conference, adding that “all the incidents have now been resolved.”
Telefónica has more than 41 million users, according to its 2023 statistics, and controls almost all of Spain’s landlines.
Downdetector, a website that tracks reports of outages, indicated a spike in connectivity issues early Tuesday on some of the other major telecommunications providers in Spain, including Movistar, O2 and Orange.
Last month, a major 18-hour power outage in Spain and neighboring Portugal left millions of people stranded, with trains and air travel grinding to a halt and business forced to close. While the Spanish authorities are still investigating the cause of the blackout, members of the public were deeply critical of the country’s handling of what amounted to an infrastructure failure that cost millions of euros.
Lynsey Chutel is a Times reporter based in London who covers breaking news in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
Qasim Nauman is a Times editor in Seoul, covering breaking news from around the world.
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