Yesterday lunchtime, at around 12:30 pm Madrid time (11:30 am in Lisbon/GMT), the entire Iberian Peninsula suddenly lost electricity as a monster power outage took down the grid that feeds both Spain and Portugal – as well as part of France.

Alanna Gladstone, a 40-year-old film editor, had landed in Portugal’s capital, Lisbon, on a flight from New York hours before the outage. She checked into her Airbnb and took a nap; by the time she woke up, the technology that the country takes for granted had gone dark.