Loveni Enari, a New Zealander living in Spain, reflects on the massive technological blip that brought the Iberian peninsula to a standstill.

Damn, I wished I’d watched The Walking Dead. I could have picked up tips on how to cope with life in a dystopian society, which is where I thought we were heading on Monday, April 28, at around 12.30pm at my home in Spain.

Time had stopped. It just froze. Minutes earlier my daughter had sent a rare text to the family WhatsApp: “The power’s gone in Madrid. What about you guys?”

Incredible, I thought, the same has just happened in León, three-and-a-half hours away. I texted my reply, remarking on the coincidence, but the message stayed, the non-cooperative watch icon signalling no luck, no signal.

I tried ringing. Nothing. I checked the computer. Meh.

Everything had stopped. Everything. At the same time. All over the country. No PC, no laptop, no mobile phone, no TV, no internet and no “normal” radio. (I predict sales of traditional, battery-operated, AM/FM, long wave, transistor radios are going to boom – the only device that worked in the blackout). I was by myself and couldn’t communicate with anyone who was not in my physical space. Incommunicado. The fact it wasn’t my choice to be alone and isolated was getting to me. My normal go-to, people-watching, was not enough.

Cars were packing out the supermarket carpark down the road and I recognised a family, university daughter included, lugging bulging bags of shopping, five-litre bottles of water, and of course, toilet paper. Memories of the pandemic flashed before my eyes.

My hunger for information and for human contact pushed me out to the supermarket mob. There were students and parents galore. “The whole cyber attack thing doesn’t worry me,” said one student, “but not being able to use my phone is getting to me.” Her mother rolled her eyes.

Another mother stood with her children, my students, around a trolley filled with more huge bottles of mineral water. “It is what it is,” she said. “It’s the times we live in and we have to get on with it,” she shrugged.

How stoic and very unlike her, I thought, and turned to her daughter, and it dawned on me. The normally timid mother was putting on a brave face for her girl, whose eyes were teary, lips quivering. “Nervous,” she said when I asked her how she was.

Outside a man told me he had the surreal feeling of being in a science fiction film and at any moment there would be an explosion of light and we would disintegrate into thin air. It’s aliens, shouted someone, as I was suddenly surrounded by teenagers leaving school. It’s Putin, shouted another. No, it’s Trump, came back the reply.

A mother told me her family in Switzerland had told her they’d also lost power minutes before losing WhatsApp. Another told me she’d heard Italy and Croatia were also affected.

Later we found out. Traffic lights had stopped working, trains had ceased mid-journey, underground trains were stranded in tunnels, flights were cancelled, passengers stuck in airports. Nurses in ICU units had nervously dusted off the old, manual respiratory pumps for when the generators gave out. It was the biggest power cut in the history of a country of more than 48 million inhabitants, which translates to a whole lot of flights, trains and confused, irate passengers and a generally anxious population. People flocked to supermarkets and, getting an early day off work, the bars. So Spanish and so good, I thought.

Supermarkets with automatic doors had closed with customers inside, lifts carrying elderly people suffered the same, remote controls for communal garages stopped working, nor did the intercom systems and doorbells people rely on to get into their homes. Students everywhere were shouting up to windows for someone to let them in. Countless people wanting lunch in restaurants and bars all over the country couldn’t pay with their phones, nor their cards, and nor could they withdraw cash. 

My classes were spent in the park, in the spring, daylight saving evening light, chatting about what you would do if you were going to die next week. I thought it was appropriate. Go parachuting, skydiving, bungee jumping and similar, said my uninterested bunch. Rob a bank, said one imp, but he had no plan. Break into an ice cream shop and die surrounded by all the flavours was the best of an unimaginative lot.

The next day we discovered everything, and yet nothing. All the hardship passengers had to endure, the anguish elderly people suffered, the general anxiety suffered by parents and grandparents. Teens and children seemed unaffected. It should have gone on and school would have been cancelled, was their general opinion.

Young geniuses of the aeronautical engineering degree I have the privilege to teach were also incredibly nonplussed and so over it. We’ve got exams to worry about, was the attitude.

Not death, destruction and disaster, I thought to myself. Maybe it was a generational thing as this enormous technological blip seems to have upset us older ones more than others. Two days later and there are still many unanswered questions.

Students with family and friends in Poland and Germany say their contacts told them the same thing happened in those countries, but only lasted half an hour. It only lasted seven or so hours where I live but villages in León’s mountains had a full 24 hours before normal service resumed.

My daughter was fine but it took her three and a half hours to get home – one hour crawling in a car and two and a half hours walking in all directions without internet to guide her.

Now that our nerves have calmed down, this may simply go down as a mighty storm in a teacup, one that reminded us of the beauty and functionality of country living, where you can make a fire to cook. It should prod us in the opposite direction of all this overrated dependence on phones and technology. But most of all, as the many memes being pumped out by the often hilarious Spaniards started hitting the media, one stuck in mind. It was simply meant to be cynical and funny when I first read it but because of that humour, it rings even truer.

It said, “Just remember that, after all this, we’ll come out the other end as better people.” Mucho amor desde España.