Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal

A look back at the Iberian power outage of April 28 By Philip Tellis on 03 May 2025 Table of Contents On Monday this week, the Iberian Peninsula suffered a major power outage that disabled many services across these countries. In this post I'll look at the patterns we saw in mPulse data during this time. Overall traffic I first looked at the overall data patterns for traffic originating from Spain & Portugal for several weeks prior to the outage. While other regions were also slightly affected, these two countries suffered the worst of it. The image above shows traffic patterns for these two countries for 7 days around the event at 1 hour granularity. We see that on average (in that mode I mean the medians), Spain has about 4.5 times the traffic of Portugal. This is expected, since Spain's population (48m) is 4.5 times that of Portugal (10.5). Identifying the Anomaly I then ran mPulse's Anomaly Detection against this data. The Anomaly Detection logic shows that traffic dropped ... Read full article.