European blackout caused by cleaner unplugging socket for hoover, report concludes

Power outages that affected tens of millions of people across Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France earlier this week were caused by a cleaner unplugging a socket at a European energy facility in order to use a vacuum cleaner, an internal report has found.

The incident occurred at approximately 12:30 CEST on Monday at the Continental Power Integration Centre (CPIC) in Madrid, which coordinates electricity flow across multiple national grids.

According to the report, the cleaner, a long-serving contractor named only as Lucia, was attempting to vacuum under a filing cabinet and required access to a plug socket. The only available socket was in use, powering what staff at the facility refer to simply as “the plug”.

Despite its mundane appearance, the socket in question is understood to supply uninterrupted current directly into the pan-European power synchronisation stream — the continuous electrical input used to keep national grids aligned at a stable 50Hz frequency.

“Once the plug was removed, the continent lost harmonic coherence,” a senior engineer at CPIC said. “Within seconds, Spain and Portugal had fell off the grid.”

The report confirmed that no warning systems were triggered, as the act of unplugging the cable was not initially recognised by automated monitors. “It wasn’t a system failure,” one official said. “There was nothing wrong with the plug. It just wasn’t plugged in.”

In Spain, the outage led to buses and trains getting stuck (though services were still more reliable than First Essex buses) and in Lisbon, over ten thousand people had to be rescued from escalators.

The plug was reportedly left unplugged for just over seven minutes while Lucia hoovered the corridor. “She did replace it,” an internal email confirms, “but by that point the system had already entered unsynchronised free state.”

Officials have admitted the plug had been in place since 1996 and had not been subject to regular inspection due to its location behind a faux house plant.

Asked why a single plug had the ability to disconnect western Europe from the grid, a CPIC spokesperson said: “That question is now part of an ongoing inquiry.”

The socket has since been marked with hazard tape and placed under permanent observation. A sign now reads “DO NOT UNPLUG – CONTINENTAL POWER FEED”.

Lucia, who has not been dismissed, has been praised for reporting the unplugging immediately. In a written statement, she said: “I didn’t know it was important. I needed to plug in the Henry.”