Renfe, Spain's national railway company, said on social media that the "entire national electricity grid was cut off" at 12:30 p.m. local time. It brought parts of Spain and Portugal to a standstill,

Power blackouts that left millions of people across Spain and Portugal without electricity may have been caused by a bizarre atmospheric phenomenon, though the true cause is yet to be determined.

That conclusion has been supported by the operator of Spain’s national grid, Red Eléctrica, which has located where outages began on Monday. Two separate incidents of power outages led to instability in the grid leading to a “breakdown in interconnections with France,” leaving the Iberian grid isolated.