A large-scale technical accident occurred in Spain – all mobile networks were down throughout the country. The incident occurred four weeks after a nationwide blackout. About this informs LBC.
All the country’s main mobile operators: Movistar, Orange, Vodafone, Digimobil and O2 faced interruptions. Customers were unable to make calls, send SMS or use mobile internet. According to DownDetector, the outages started around 5:00 a.m.
The problems covered most of Spain, including the big cities of Madrid, Malaga, Barcelona, Valencia, Murcia, Seville and Bilbao. Users across the country reported a complete lack of signal and interruptions in Internet access.
The incident also affected the telephone lines of emergency services: in a number of regions, the number 112, which is the pan-European emergency number, was unavailable. The government of Valencia introduced an alternative number for the rescue service, while in Aragon, it was reported on social networks that “the telephone line 112 is not working” and provided three temporary substitutes.
In addition, some companies were completely blocked from accessing their systems, unable to run software or connect computers to the network. The cause of the failure was a large-scale technical failure in the system of Telefónica, the main operator of mobile networks in Spain. The company is the second largest in the country and operates in 18 countries around the world, making it one of the largest global telecommunications players.
The phone outages were reportedly the result of a network upgrade that went awry and left millions of Spaniards without service.
“We have carried out some network upgrades which have affected some companies’ fixed line services (voice and internet),”— said a Telefónica representative.
He added that the company is working on solving the problem, and some services have already been restored, in particular the functioning of the emergency number 112.
The outage comes on the heels of a recent incident when a massive power outage left millions of residents in Spain and Portugal without power for nearly 10 hours on April 28. At the time, the Spanish government said that a cyber attack was not the cause of the accident.
