Telefónica has resolved an issue that caused a widespread mobile network blackout across Spain, with all major providers including Vodafone, O2, Orange, and Movistar affected.
The outage, reportedly linked to a network update issued by Telefónica, began around 5am local time, per the website Downdetector. Customers across the entirety of Spain were unable to make phone calls, access mobile data, or send SMS.
"This morning we had an incident that affected the fixed communications services of some companies and public services," said Telefónica, in a statement shared with ITPro.
"We have been working from the outset to restore these services, which have now been fully recovered. We have activated the incident management committee, we have isolated the affected nodes and we have deployed field staff to resolve specific cases arising from this incident, which has now been resolved".
During the outage, 112 emergency calls in certain regions were also impacted.
Regional governments scrambled to alleviate the impact of these emergency service disruptions. According to the English edition of Diario Sur, the governments of Aragon, the Basque Country, and Valencia have been forced to issue alternatives to 112 to serve citizens during the outage.
Spain’s critical infrastructure once again impacted
The outage comes less than one month after a catastrophic power outage plunged Spain and Portugal into darkness and froze businesses and critical processes such as public transport and airports.
Initial reports that the outage could have been caused by a cyber attack were played down in the weeks after the attack, though as recently as last week Spain continued to demand more information from power suppliers to rule out cyber criminal activity as a cause altogether.
In either case, today’s outage underlines the capacity for software changes to impact critical national infrastructure (CNI) such as phone and mobile networks.
This article has been updated to include the latest information on the outage.
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