All telecom providers in Spain suffer from a widespread outage

Some weeks ago, all eyes were on Spain and Portugal: it was unbelievable that in 2025, two major European countries could experience a total power blackout for 18 hours. The outage affected millions, halted trains and flights, forced businesses to close, and much more.

Now, Spain has been experiencing a widespread phone network failure and disrupted communications early Tuesday, disabling emergency lines in much of the country for several hours.

The disruption affected all major telecom providers, including Movistar, Orange, Vodafone, Digimobil, and O2. According to the monitoring site DownDetector, the blackout began around 5 a.m., leaving customers unable to make phone calls, send or receive text messages, or access mobile data.

Reports of service loss quickly spread nationwide, with users in major cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, Malaga, Valencia, Seville, Murcia, and Bilbao describing total blackouts and signal loss. Internet issues were also widespread, adding to the impact.



Telefónica, one of Spain's largest telecom companies, stated that the outage resulted from planned maintenance work. The company explained that the network upgrade unexpectedly affected fixed communication services, including landlines and internet connections. Many users also found themselves unable to reach the national emergency number, 112.

In response to the service disruption, emergency departments in Valencia, Aragón, and the Basque Country took to social media to share alternative mobile numbers for emergency contact. Authorities in Catalonia and Extremadura confirmed their 112 services were impacted but assured the public that backup systems had been implemented. In Andalusia, officials acknowledged a national issue with the emergency network, though they reported that service was gradually returning.

By late morning, Telefónica announced that full service had been restored. Spain’s minister for digital transformation, Óscar López, confirmed the resolution and expressed gratitude for the company's prompt response. He stated that authorities had been in contact with Telefónica from the outset and noted that the incident had been resolved entirely.

With over 41 million users, Telefónica operates nearly all of Spain's landline infrastructure. DownDetector also recorded a sharp rise in outage reports early Tuesday across other major providers like Movistar, O2, and Orange.