> some information services were still able to stay online and available
I’m in Valencia, Spain.
The mobile internet connectivity here during the power outage was very unstable.
Cellular phone signal strength was also very very low for the majority of the time.
Even sending SMS or WhatsApp messages would not work most of the day, because of just how unusable mobile connection was for me and my girlfriend and our families here.
And I only managed to load news pages, national or foreign, a few times during the hours of outage, to try and get some information on what cause, how widespread, and how long it would probably take to restore power.
On the plus side I did get to try my little solar panel for the first time to try and charge one of my power banks using solar power. And it did seem to get some juice out of it.
The biggest problems of all from my pov was:
- We live on the 8th floor with a 1 year-old baby. Going 8 floors of stairs with the stroller was not fun.
- All my money is electronic, except from one 50 euro bill I had in my wallet. How was I going to pay for water and food if this outage would go on.
- What’s going on? How bad is it? How long is it going to last? Very unstable mobile internet as mentioned.
In the end we ended up staying outside going for a walk and meeting up with my mother a bit and then me and my girlfriend and our baby going to the beach and sitting there until late. Finally when we came home lights were starting to come back on. And the elevator was working again too!
The next day the first thing I did was walk to the nearest ATM and withdraw several hundred euros, and I bought a bunch of water. We don’t have a car, so I used one of my big bags with wheels to be able to bring more water home than usual.
sillyfluke · 8h ago
> All my money is electronic
Yes, one positive aspect of these types of events is that the hazing against the cash-first minority worldwide has ebbed slightly. Sweden seems to be backtracking from their cashless push due to the threat of Russian cyberattacks as well.
In related news, high-speed trains appear to have been sabotaged in Spain today, causing transportation chaos again. This happened while they have not been able to conclusively determine the cause of the blackout.
The plot thickens...or gets sidetracked, depending on what the truth turns out to be.
blockmarker · 55m ago
It is not at all certain that there was any sabotage. Supposedly it was sabotage because important wires were stolen, but wire has been stolen by criminals for decades to sell for the materials. And for the last few years there has been an increase of delays, breakdowns and failures in the whole railway network. It is far more likely that common theft on a decaying system caused the problems, but that would pin the blame on the government for this decay. As such they prefer to blame anyone else, including shadowy enemies sabotaging the country.
makeitdouble · 7h ago
> hazing against the cash-first minority
That's...a pretty strong opinion.
Otherwise cash will still have it's issue during a blackout. For instance I'm not sure most shops would operate their POS during a blackout or without any connectivity, at least if there is any hope of resuming normal operations within days, it would screw the ledgers. ATMs of course are dead. Vending machines are also probably not ready for that (Japan has emergency ready ones, I can't imagine other countries doing that)
We're already in a world where cash is second class citizen, and it won't just get back to the "good old days" because of a temporary outage.
And it will also be a different story altogether if power/internet never comes back. Having cash stashed somewhere might not help you that much.
coldpie · 7h ago
> That's...a pretty strong opinion.
If you're a person who uses cash a lot, the comments you hear do start to feel a bit like hazing. You very often hear jokes like "who uses cash anymore?" both directed at you and not, like you're a crazy person for preferring not to support Visa's advertising empire with a ~1-3% tithe on every purchase.
bombcar · 6h ago
It's interesting and informative to watch how different places handle power failures (which where I am in the USA are not common but not entirely rare, either).
Most of the bars keep serving to cash customers, and use paper to make notes for future bookkeeping. Some even start using paper tabs.
Big companies switch to backup generators (Walmart) or immediately cease business (also Walmart, because the card communication failed).
Some smaller ones had no lights to continue to be safe inside, so chased everyone out.
Other ones had enough windows and kept selling on a cash basis, making notes by hand. Some of these could open the cash drawer others couldn't, but made do with what they could.
sillyfluke · 7h ago
>That's...a pretty strong opinion.
I'll go out on a limb and say it's only a strong opinion for anyone who isn't familiar with trying to use cash exclusively for all physical transcations under 1000 dollars in their day-to-day lives.
In London, they have tube stations with a single coffee stand on the platform that's card-only. It's a fucking outrage in my humble opinion. and just another form of debanking, pure and simple.
Symbiote · 5h ago
Denmark is often cited as an example of a society that's advanced for electronic payments, and it is — but there's a law here that means, in most circumstances, a business must accept cash.
The official advice was changed from "keep some cash for emergencies" to "keep some cash in small banknotes for emergencies" to "pay in cash at least sometimes, to keep the systems that deal with it functioning".
cft · 7h ago
The cause is the frequency drop that was not compensated by the inertia of rotating turbines due to increasing use of photovoltaics. See https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1916893181876326868?t=32a...
A high level engineer in a Spanish generation plant confirmed this to me.
cesarb · 5h ago
> The cause is the frequency drop that was not compensated by the inertia of rotating turbines due to increasing use of photovoltaics.
But what caused the frequency drop? Large-scale grids are designed and operated in such a manner that any single fault, even one which causes a frequency drop (like a generator or a power line getting disconnected), will not cause a blackout. Which means: if there isn't enough inertia to compensate the frequency drop caused by a single fault anywhere in the grid, the system operator will either order photovoltaics and wind turbines to reduce their generation to a safer level, or order traditional rotating generators to operate as synchronous condensers (which adds inertia without adding generation).
Which means that either there was a double fault (two faults close enough in time that there wasn't enough time to reconfigure the system to a safer state before the second fault), or that the modeling of how the photovoltaics and wind turbines would react to a single fault was incorrect (for instance, expecting them to stay connected for longer on that level of frequency drop). My personal guess is that we're going to see a repeat of what happened here in Brazil in 2023, as I explained in another comment on an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43821801), where a single fault was enough to destabilize the system because the inverters in wind and solar power plants disconnected earlier than expected.
cft · 5h ago
According to my friend, the freq drop was caused by a sudden large supply surplus over the instantaneous demand. Nuclear plants were offline and there was nothing to absorb the freq drop at that moment.
cesarb · 5h ago
> According to my friend, the freq drop was caused by a sudden large supply surplus over the instantaneous demand.
Wouldn't a supply surplus cause a frequency increase, not a frequency drop?
cft · 5h ago
In the case of the rotating generators, yes. In the case of the solar panels, I do not know: I guess it depends on the inverters characterists? Spanish is not my native language, so I may have mixed it up when talking to him.
otherme123 · 6h ago
Nobody knows the cause at the moment. All that we have are guesses and FUD. Even "high level engineers" don't know for sure what happened.
MisterTea · 6h ago
> - What’s going on? How bad is it? How long is it going to last? Very unstable mobile internet as mentioned.
Silly question but do you have AM or FM radio? When the lights went out in the northeast blackout of 2003 we turned to our cars to put on AM radio. Even after Hurricane Sandy my mother was without power for 3 weeks and she was running a battery powered radio.
I shudder to think of a future where moving information requires high performance digital electronics vs. a crystal radio set.
fhdkweig · 44m ago
My Android cell phone has a FM radio app that was pre-installed at the factory. It requires the use of wired headphones to act as an antenna, but otherwise works fine.
codetrotter · 5h ago
It’s a very valid question.
I don’t have one currently. But I did hear later that others were using radio to get news.
Thank you for bringing it up again. I’m gonna buy a small battery powered radio :)
prof-dr-ir · 7h ago
> The next day the first thing I did was walk to the nearest ATM and withdraw several hundred euros, and I bought a bunch of water.
That is a very good idea for everyone. Putting together an emergency supplies kit is what various European governments, and now also the European Commission, are beginning to officially recommend:
> What’s going on? How bad is it? How long is it going to last?
I think some governments suggest that people buy a battery-powered or hand crank radio to address exactly this issue.
mjevans · 7h ago
Many of these also have small solar panels. Enough to recharge the device and sometimes build up a charge for other devices like a tablet or cell phone. It wouldn't be enough to continuously run that greedy screen, but it would be enough to maintain standby radio contact.
gus_massa · 5h ago
> And I only managed to load news pages,
Did you try with HN? I remember a long time ago I was in a hotel with bad connectivity, and one of the few sites that loaded was HN (no images, almost no JS, ...). I was able to read the comments, but it was difficult to read most of the articles.
heraldgeezer · 1h ago
In Sweden we all get this. Saying you should have water, food, radio and cash and more so maybe Spain or EU needs this too :) Now do I have this, no. But we are further.
> And I only managed to load news pages, national or foreign, a few times during the hours of outage
I think this is a problem with https. I remember intermittent connectivity as way better before Google forced the issue.
And yes I like https. But it comes with drawbacks. E.g. no isp caching.
blahaj · 6h ago
I don't think ISP caching would be a thing without https. It would bring a lot of additional complexity and resource requirements for them. I can hardly imagine that being worth it to save some bandwidth.
Maybe it made sense in a world where bandwidth was very limited.
Also I am very happy that it is not a thing and that ISPs cannot do that. When I go to a website I want to get the website from the webserver exactly as the server delivers it and not some other page that my ISP thinks is how the website should look.
Besides with global CDNs we have something very similar but better anyway. I don't get the site from the other side of the world but from the closest CDN server that does caching. The important difference is that the CDN server is authorized by the website to cache the page and the webmaster has control over what it does.
rightbyte · 1h ago
> When I go to a website I want to get the website from the webserver exactly as the server delivers it and not some other page that my ISP thinks is how the website should look.
You could have some hash check to prevent hijacking. The old method would be naive today.
There would be some privacy concerns I guess. But it could be opt-in on the site owners part. I think caching some videos and pictures would save a lot of power.
> Besides with global CDNs we have something very similar but better anyway.
Sure but they are some switches away.
cesarb · 5h ago
> I don't think ISP caching would be a thing without https. It would bring a lot of additional complexity and resource requirements for them. I can hardly imagine that being worth it to save some bandwidth. Maybe it made sense in a world where bandwidth was very limited.
Transparent squid proxies were common back when most sites were on http. They let ISPs reduce the use of their limited upstream bandwidth, while also making sites load faster. The complexity and resource requirements were modest: install squid on a server, and configure the router to redirect (masquerade) all outgoing TCP port 80 connections to the port configured for squid on that server.
bluesmoon · 7h ago
Thank you for your personal story about this. It helps to put things in perspective.
briandear · 8h ago
I'm in Barcelona (Sabadell specifically,) and the cellular networks were down. Luckily I have a generator and Starlink.
amelius · 7h ago
Curious if anyone was able to use their Meshtastic radio to contact anyone.
I live close to Lisbon (in the South margin of the Tagus river) and I can say Meshtastic was very active throughout the outage.
I received news of power coming back in the first few towns through it, before FM radio.
I needed to get closer to the river to get reliable contacts, but I've now ordered a nice antenna and a solar kit to mount a repeater in a mast on my roof so I can cover the center of my town more reliably.
imhoguy · 7h ago
Isn't Starlink using country-local ground stations for the Internet connectivity? Likely they had power-backup but could it switch to foreign country stations?
genewitch · 6h ago
They have lasers on the satellites so they can relay to another ground station. I "come out" in either Dallas or Georgia somewhere. Once I exited in Wyoming or thereabouts.
TrianguloY · 7h ago
I work on the University, and there I recovered wired internet rather quickly probably due to backup generators. At home most routers stopped, some even took until the next day to be functional again.
As for mobile connectivity, the main issue was the congestion. The cell network didn't fail, usually, but in most places either your phone wasn't able to connect or had no internet. Too many people trying at the same time, I guess.
On the University on the other hand it worked perfectly. Maybe because it's a usual crowded place and there are more resources, but I think it was also because a lot of students (even teachers) went home, so those who stayed were mostly alone with a good internet...but less people to talk to.
giorgioz · 8h ago
I was in Spain during the blackout nearby Valencia. My phone had 3G data connectivity from 12:30 to 18:30 despite the outage. Same for the fiber signal, powering the modem&router with batteries allowed me to a working fiber connection for 4 hours.
Some neighbors with different mobile operators told me they did not have signal. It might be some operator had backup diesel generator that lasted 4 hours.
pmontra · 7h ago
Not only the backup generator of that base station but the backup power of all the network hardware up to it. The base station could have outlasted some other parts that run out of diesel before it did and yet it did not have connectivity.
myself248 · 8h ago
It's one thing to have traffic data, presumably connected from some internet point or something, idk, I just assume that everything's monitored somewhere.
But how do they know users' phone battery level?
scary-size · 7h ago
That one threw me off as well! As the other commentators mentioned: "Navigator.getBattery" in browsers is the culprit. "Luckily" it's not supported in Safari and Firefox.
littlecranky67 · 8h ago
> But how do they know users' phone battery level?
>Spaniards have a later lunch, starting around 1pm, and going on until 4 or 5pm. This could possibly be due to the tradition of afternoon siesta.
It's "funny" how someone that is supposed to be so smart, can be so ignorant at the same time
wink · 6h ago
Or bad at interpreting data?
Of course not all Germans go for lunch at 12-1 but unless you are in retail or your team has decided 1-2 is better, or 30min is enough.. I think it's just a very good guess that it's 12-1 for most the people. If it was a real 50:50 split between 12-1 or 1-2 then it could look like a 2h break. Unsure, I can't read their data properly.
sillyfluke · 8h ago
I'm curious what was the situation with Spaniards and Portuguese people roaming elsewhere in the EU with their local phones, since roaming phones are usually patched through the home country telecoms. Did their experience differ significantly compared to their compatriots?
whitehexagon · 7h ago
We awoke to power the next day, but mobile phone services only returned some hours later. Amazing how busy the banks were with people desperately seeking cash. Unfortunately the banks dont handle cash here now, and the ATMs were all offline.
The first few hours were scary, due to complete lack of information. I am not sure how people had internet access, seemed like all networks were down here. I dont follow any news (apart from HN) but from what people are saying locally, the cause is still unknown, which I guess means it can happen again at any time.
Any recommendations from preppers on a suitable portable radio? It would be nice next time to be able to distinguish rare draughty power line issues from possible start of WWIII.
DoingIsLearning · 1h ago
Tecsun PL series is pretty much the modern version the old Grundig Yachtboy series.
I have a PL 330 as my 'is there anybody out there' armaggedon world radio receiver. I also sometimes use it just for kicks to hear radio from somewhere unreasonably far away from me.
You can find a lot of pros and cons across the different models in their offering with plenty of online discussion as well.
genewitch · 6h ago
You want a portable shortwave radio with external antenna. Amazon shows them ~$30 which is about what they cost. If you get a fancy one they go 3-4 times as expensive. I have a radio shack grundig battery powered one and it works fine.
Look at reviews, I guess, or try and find an old grundig. I'm sure other people have other brands/models.
If I can remember the last decent one I was looking at I'll comment again, but hopefully this will set you on the right track.
whitehexagon · 3h ago
Thanks. I'll have another look, the ones I'd seen on amzn es looked a bit gimmicky, solar torch, hand crank, bt, but looked like they would last 5min or melt in the rain.
wkat4242 · 8h ago
Be aware that internet usage was pretty much impossible. Landline internet dropped soon after the outage even for those with UPS systems.
And 5G internet was completely unusable during the outage. All 3 major networks immediately switched to "Emergency calls only" status and allowed zero data. So doing analysis on it isn't very useful because most people had no access and only small packets made it through (favouring more simple services). It worked maybe 10 minutes every couple of hours and very limited.
I have an Iridium backup for emergency calls too. But no internet. And was thinking of getting Starlink but I don't want it anymore since musk going nazi and also the Spanish Government seems to have dropped a 9€ per month surcharge on it.
onionisafruit · 7h ago
> there were no visits to these [government food safety] sites at any time prior to this event for the several weeks that I looked at the data
That’s crazy that their usage is that low. Not even one visitor?
anthk · 7h ago
In my case, 2G/3G connections with a power outage from 12:30 PM to 14:20 PM in Bilbao. Calls barely worked and for the internet, being a doomed nerd I've juse used Lagrange under Android with Gopher and Gemini proxies to the web (News Waffle) in order to read the newspapers because our media outlets didn even fit the sites for the low bandwith, something North Americans are greatly doing with https://text.npr.org and https://lite.cnn.io
Some people even bought FM radio receivers en masse; because they work with batteries and the stations and repeaters are already set to use emergency generators.
NooneAtAll3 · 6h ago
why do phones leak battery percentage to the internet?
Something similar happened in Ontario many years ago, it was out for like 7 days. The neighbours came outside and talked, and everyone spent a lot more time outdoors. Saw the stars, and people burned candles in the evening. I actually look fondly at it, and feel like everyone should experience this. Now in the back of my mind is this feeling of wanting to live in a world without modern technology. Take a time travel vacation to the 17th century.
anthk · 7h ago
Ah, yes, a flagged comment, because maybe some clueless idiots think the whole of Spain it's a paradisian beach in the Southern Mediterranean part and they didn't manage to research about the split work schedule affecting the whole country, even when the North and mountain/plains the temps can get below 0 in Winter with ease, so the whole siesta myth get crushed down.
No siesta, but:
- Lunch with the family. No phones, just the TV news.
- GMT+1 Timezone, so the sun's highest point it's at 13/14PM
.
Would it be possible to sign up for Starlink __during__ an outage like this?
ru552 · 7h ago
Sure, but you can't use it until the hardware shows up.
amelius · 6h ago
I found this:
> SpaceX Corp. has launched six Starlink satellites that can provide internet access for smartphone users without requiring them to purchase additional hardware such as antennas.
You mean online? Using what connection exactly? :)
Thaxll · 7h ago
How would it work if people don't have power to run the local antenna.
genewitch · 6h ago
Unless it's heating I don't think it uses much power. If you'd like I can plug mine into a kill-a-watt and see the draw. I can't imagine it's more than 100W all told, which the UPS it is connected to will run with the switches for probably a full day, and I have a specific generator for recharging UPS (a Honda with an inverter, clean enough power.)
They don't move or anything during use, and they beamform which drastically reduces the power needed. At least this is my understanding.
wkat4242 · 7h ago
That's easy. Generator, UPS. I used my UPS to keep my fibre up for a couple hours when the outage happened. At some point after that the local DSLAM lost power too though, I guess they only have limited batteries too.
The Starlink mini model is also easily powerable by battery without 220V converter.
Funes- · 7h ago
>Germans take a 1 hour lunch from 12-1pm. Spaniards have a later lunch, starting around 1pm, and going on until 4 or 5pm. This could possibly be due to the tradition of afternoon siesta.
This is not only untrue, but I would argue it also borders on being defamatory, consciously or not. Lunch breaks are typically one to two hours long in Spain, not three to four hours long--that's ridiculous. What the author is describing there would better fit what we tend to do during weekends, where "sobremesa" (coffee and drinks after we're done with the main dishes) can admittedly get a bit out of hand, but absolutely not on working days.
seszett · 6h ago
They misunderstood "one or two-hour lunch anywhere between 1pm to 5pm" for "4-hour lunch from 1pm to 5pm". Same with France, people have a 1-hour lunch either from 12 to 1pm or from 1pm to 2pm, rarely a 2-hour lunch.
bluesmoon · 6h ago
Thanks for the feedback. It's more correct to say that traffic drops off for 3-4 hours rather than everyone goes offline for 3-4 hours. It's likely to be staggered based on the slope of the curve at that point.
Symbiote · 5h ago
Also, Germany is 13° east of Spain. That's almost 1 hour worth, 1 hour would be 15°.
There's a misconception that Spanish people are 'lazy' for their late lunches, but they're eating lunch at roughly the same local solar time.
snkzxbs · 6h ago
You are missing the fact that a lot of people in Spain, maybe the majority, do what’s called a “jornada partida”, which means that businesses close at around 1-2 pm and then reopen at around 5-6 pm. During that time people generally have lunch and maybe sleep.
Especially during the hotter months, the streets are practically empty.
dcrazy · 6h ago
This seemed to me to vary by region. It was near universal when I visited Andalucía, including in Sevilla. It was uncommon in Madrid, and I don’t remember encountering it at all in Barcelona.
dagw · 6h ago
Is that actually still a big thing? I've worked on several projects with people in Spain, and none of them did that. Lunch was never more than an hour, and basically everybody was back from lunch and working by 2.30 at the latest.
ergl · 5h ago
Jornada partida doesn't tend to apply to office workers and white collar work in general. It's common to see it in small shops, but it's in steep decline even in those areas.
kranke155 · 6h ago
The siesta essentially does not exist in a lot of workplaces in Spain anyway.
bluesmoon · 6h ago
That's a fair criticism. The data suggests that there are different breaks spread out over that 3-4 hour period, not one break of 3-4 hours. I've reworded it accordingly.
dcrazy · 6h ago
It’s accurate for business hours in at least some parts of the country, but it is paired with late closing. Even office workers will be on the job until 8. Popular wisdom attributes it to Franco’s adoption of Central European Time to be aligned with Hitler.
echelon · 6h ago
> Lunch breaks are [...] two hours long in Spain
Wow.
alexpotato · 8h ago
> Germans take a 1 hour lunch from 12-1pm. Spaniards have a later lunch, starting around 1pm, and going on until 4 or 5pm. This could possibly be due to the tradition of afternoon siesta.
NPR had a podcast episode (Planet Money maybe?) about how the EU was supposed to make it easier for firms to hire cross border and employees to move around. The idea was to be more like the United States.
Apparently, this didn't quite work out due to both language and cultural differences
Then, one of the guests says:
"Yes, there were some challenges. In fact, we ended up getting books with titles like: 'How to manage Spaniards if you are a German'"
bryanlarsen · 8h ago
Solar noon in Madrid is at 2:13PM due to the absurd time zone that Spain's in. Having lunch at 1PM is early, not late.
wink · 6h ago
But why would you take your lunch break according to the sun, especially if you work in an office?
I'm not trying to play dumb, but sun rises at 6 in the summer in Germany - most people take their lunch break at 12. Sun rises at, I dunno, 8? in the winter - lunch break at 12. Nothing changes and people are usually awake for a while already.
I couldn't tell you when the majority of office workers starts. I would say 9, especially as it's also averaging out 8 and 10 - but I am not sure. Do people in offices (who are not in media agencies) more typically start at 10 or 11?
ntonozzi · 7h ago
Well this explains a lot of things that I always attributed to Spanish culture.
briandear · 8h ago
A legacy of Franco and Hitler. (Franco wanted to be on Nazi Germany's time zone.)
I once heard a Danish head of a university say that they wanted more Swedes to come over and work because Danish workers tend to question orders more than Swedes do.
I have no idea if this is true, just sounded funny to me.
mrweasel · 7h ago
When working for a Norwegian company, but with colleague in all of Scandinavia, we where introduced to the notion that as Danes we tend to be a bit pushing, impatient and just wanting to get on with the job. This would clash with the Norwegians who would want to do a lot of prep-work, upfront documentation and generally follow a certain procedure. The Swedes would avoid starting something until very one on the project had been heard and their concerns addressed.
If this is completely true in all cases seems questionable to me, but we did complete a project faster than the Oslo office could plan and document an identical project in Norway, resulting in an audit from the head office.
alexpotato · 4h ago
I'm a dual US/Italian citizen and the joke in Italy is:
"The Germans like the Italians b/c they are fun but don't respect them b/c they are disorganized.
The Italians respect the Germans b/c they are organized but don't like them b/c they are not fun"
bazoom42 · 8h ago
What I have heard: Danes question orders. Swedes follow orders. Norwegians does not question orders, but does not follow them either unless they feel like it.
Don’t know if this is true.
rightbyte · 7h ago
I guess the joke should be 'there are no orders' not 'follow orders'.
retSava · 8h ago
Also interesting with the sharp 10AM spike on both desktop and mobile in Germany. Video calls, I presume.
Rebelgecko · 7m ago
I was surprised by the same thing. Is it a common time for meetings? Is there some cultural thing that happens exactly at 10am?
bluesmoon · 7h ago
I have it on my TODO list to look a little more into that. It caught me by surprise when I pulled up the data for Germany.
tecleandor · 7h ago
In offices it would usually be from ~14h to 15h or 15:30h. Open to the public, street-level, small businesses (let's say, a butcher, a small hardware store, a bakery...) usually close from 14h to 16h or 16:30h. They open till later than other countries, though, often till 20h or so. That can vary per region and the size of the city, of course.
anthk · 7h ago
But not for siesta, for lunch. And, by lunch, for HNers, I mean a mid sized meal, not just a sandwitch.
The problem is Spain is that we have the breakfast and lunch kinda the opposite as the Brits.
Brits eat a big breakfast and a small lunch. We do the opposite. Some coffee and maybe a small pastry, and we are done for breakfast. For luch, we have a first and second dish and a dessert.
metronomer · 7h ago
tbh that's in mostly an exaggeration, specially among new gens who tend to do more quick lunchs and take-aways.
Even though we have lunch significantly later than the european average (I'd even say closer to 2pm or even up to 3pm rather than 1pm), something that somewhat awkwardly here I agree it's excessive, I doubt anyone (unless they're exploiting the cultural-difference thing and somehow it's working) stays until 5pm lunchin' midweek.
Perhaps it may only be applicable in the context of the weekend (when lots of gatherings at bars and tapa overdoses for who-knows-how much time happen), but overall for at least 5 out of 7 days a week that's an oversimplification.
charliebwrites · 8h ago
> lunch … starting around 1pm, and going on until 4 or 5pm
So wait when do they get work done? Do they just work later into the night?
masklinn · 7h ago
Yes. The historical siesta is about mitigating the hottest part of the day, spaniards tend to work both earlier and later.
anthk · 7h ago
The Northern of Spain has no concept of hot in the Summer. The actual issue is that we are living in the same timezone as Berlin.
And we are like reverse Brits.
Brits: big breakfast, small lunch.
Spain: small breakfast (coffee and a small pastry), and big lunch.
So, we aren't having siesta. We have a big gap at work to be able to feed ourselves on time.
wkat4242 · 7h ago
You mean the northwest like Galicia? The northeast where I live still gets plenty hot. We don't have major beach resorts like Lloret and Salou for no reason :)
Though I guess this might not qualify as "Spain" depending on who you ask - if I ask my neighbours if they are living in Spain they certainly will say NO :P Hot topic alert :)
anthk · 2h ago
The Atlantic Spain and everything around Picos de Europa. Also, most mountain ranges, and Spain is the 2nd most mountainous country in Europe, so a lot of Spain is not that warm in Winter.
ornitorrincos · 6h ago
the only people I know who do that are shopkeepers as they stay closed until 5 when people start leaving work
I’m in Valencia, Spain.
The mobile internet connectivity here during the power outage was very unstable.
Cellular phone signal strength was also very very low for the majority of the time.
Even sending SMS or WhatsApp messages would not work most of the day, because of just how unusable mobile connection was for me and my girlfriend and our families here.
And I only managed to load news pages, national or foreign, a few times during the hours of outage, to try and get some information on what cause, how widespread, and how long it would probably take to restore power.
On the plus side I did get to try my little solar panel for the first time to try and charge one of my power banks using solar power. And it did seem to get some juice out of it.
The biggest problems of all from my pov was:
- We live on the 8th floor with a 1 year-old baby. Going 8 floors of stairs with the stroller was not fun.
- All my money is electronic, except from one 50 euro bill I had in my wallet. How was I going to pay for water and food if this outage would go on.
- What’s going on? How bad is it? How long is it going to last? Very unstable mobile internet as mentioned.
In the end we ended up staying outside going for a walk and meeting up with my mother a bit and then me and my girlfriend and our baby going to the beach and sitting there until late. Finally when we came home lights were starting to come back on. And the elevator was working again too!
The next day the first thing I did was walk to the nearest ATM and withdraw several hundred euros, and I bought a bunch of water. We don’t have a car, so I used one of my big bags with wheels to be able to bring more water home than usual.
Yes, one positive aspect of these types of events is that the hazing against the cash-first minority worldwide has ebbed slightly. Sweden seems to be backtracking from their cashless push due to the threat of Russian cyberattacks as well.
In related news, high-speed trains appear to have been sabotaged in Spain today, causing transportation chaos again. This happened while they have not been able to conclusively determine the cause of the blackout.
The plot thickens...or gets sidetracked, depending on what the truth turns out to be.
That's...a pretty strong opinion.
Otherwise cash will still have it's issue during a blackout. For instance I'm not sure most shops would operate their POS during a blackout or without any connectivity, at least if there is any hope of resuming normal operations within days, it would screw the ledgers. ATMs of course are dead. Vending machines are also probably not ready for that (Japan has emergency ready ones, I can't imagine other countries doing that)
We're already in a world where cash is second class citizen, and it won't just get back to the "good old days" because of a temporary outage.
And it will also be a different story altogether if power/internet never comes back. Having cash stashed somewhere might not help you that much.
If you're a person who uses cash a lot, the comments you hear do start to feel a bit like hazing. You very often hear jokes like "who uses cash anymore?" both directed at you and not, like you're a crazy person for preferring not to support Visa's advertising empire with a ~1-3% tithe on every purchase.
Most of the bars keep serving to cash customers, and use paper to make notes for future bookkeeping. Some even start using paper tabs.
Big companies switch to backup generators (Walmart) or immediately cease business (also Walmart, because the card communication failed).
Some smaller ones had no lights to continue to be safe inside, so chased everyone out.
Other ones had enough windows and kept selling on a cash basis, making notes by hand. Some of these could open the cash drawer others couldn't, but made do with what they could.
I'll go out on a limb and say it's only a strong opinion for anyone who isn't familiar with trying to use cash exclusively for all physical transcations under 1000 dollars in their day-to-day lives.
In London, they have tube stations with a single coffee stand on the platform that's card-only. It's a fucking outrage in my humble opinion. and just another form of debanking, pure and simple.
The official advice was changed from "keep some cash for emergencies" to "keep some cash in small banknotes for emergencies" to "pay in cash at least sometimes, to keep the systems that deal with it functioning".
But what caused the frequency drop? Large-scale grids are designed and operated in such a manner that any single fault, even one which causes a frequency drop (like a generator or a power line getting disconnected), will not cause a blackout. Which means: if there isn't enough inertia to compensate the frequency drop caused by a single fault anywhere in the grid, the system operator will either order photovoltaics and wind turbines to reduce their generation to a safer level, or order traditional rotating generators to operate as synchronous condensers (which adds inertia without adding generation).
Which means that either there was a double fault (two faults close enough in time that there wasn't enough time to reconfigure the system to a safer state before the second fault), or that the modeling of how the photovoltaics and wind turbines would react to a single fault was incorrect (for instance, expecting them to stay connected for longer on that level of frequency drop). My personal guess is that we're going to see a repeat of what happened here in Brazil in 2023, as I explained in another comment on an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43821801), where a single fault was enough to destabilize the system because the inverters in wind and solar power plants disconnected earlier than expected.
Wouldn't a supply surplus cause a frequency increase, not a frequency drop?
Silly question but do you have AM or FM radio? When the lights went out in the northeast blackout of 2003 we turned to our cars to put on AM radio. Even after Hurricane Sandy my mother was without power for 3 weeks and she was running a battery powered radio.
I shudder to think of a future where moving information requires high performance digital electronics vs. a crystal radio set.
I don’t have one currently. But I did hear later that others were using radio to get news.
Thank you for bringing it up again. I’m gonna buy a small battery powered radio :)
That is a very good idea for everyone. Putting together an emergency supplies kit is what various European governments, and now also the European Commission, are beginning to officially recommend:
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/03/26/brussels-ask-e...
> What’s going on? How bad is it? How long is it going to last?
I think some governments suggest that people buy a battery-powered or hand crank radio to address exactly this issue.
Did you try with HN? I remember a long time ago I was in a hotel with bad connectivity, and one of the few sites that loaded was HN (no images, almost no JS, ...). I was able to read the comments, but it was difficult to read most of the articles.
https://rib.msb.se/filer/pdf/30874.pdf
EU has started this a bit, we are waking up. EVROPA.
https://www.dw.com/en/european-union-response-disasters-war-...
I think this is a problem with https. I remember intermittent connectivity as way better before Google forced the issue.
And yes I like https. But it comes with drawbacks. E.g. no isp caching.
Also I am very happy that it is not a thing and that ISPs cannot do that. When I go to a website I want to get the website from the webserver exactly as the server delivers it and not some other page that my ISP thinks is how the website should look.
Besides with global CDNs we have something very similar but better anyway. I don't get the site from the other side of the world but from the closest CDN server that does caching. The important difference is that the CDN server is authorized by the website to cache the page and the webmaster has control over what it does.
You could have some hash check to prevent hijacking. The old method would be naive today.
There would be some privacy concerns I guess. But it could be opt-in on the site owners part. I think caching some videos and pictures would save a lot of power.
> Besides with global CDNs we have something very similar but better anyway.
Sure but they are some switches away.
Transparent squid proxies were common back when most sites were on http. They let ISPs reduce the use of their limited upstream bandwidth, while also making sites load faster. The complexity and resource requirements were modest: install squid on a server, and configure the router to redirect (masquerade) all outgoing TCP port 80 connections to the port configured for squid on that server.
https://meshtastic.org/
I received news of power coming back in the first few towns through it, before FM radio.
I needed to get closer to the river to get reliable contacts, but I've now ordered a nice antenna and a solar kit to mount a repeater in a mast on my roof so I can cover the center of my town more reliably.
As for mobile connectivity, the main issue was the congestion. The cell network didn't fail, usually, but in most places either your phone wasn't able to connect or had no internet. Too many people trying at the same time, I guess. On the University on the other hand it worked perfectly. Maybe because it's a usual crowded place and there are more resources, but I think it was also because a lot of students (even teachers) went home, so those who stayed were mostly alone with a good internet...but less people to talk to.
But how do they know users' phone battery level?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/g...
It's "funny" how someone that is supposed to be so smart, can be so ignorant at the same time
Of course not all Germans go for lunch at 12-1 but unless you are in retail or your team has decided 1-2 is better, or 30min is enough.. I think it's just a very good guess that it's 12-1 for most the people. If it was a real 50:50 split between 12-1 or 1-2 then it could look like a 2h break. Unsure, I can't read their data properly.
The first few hours were scary, due to complete lack of information. I am not sure how people had internet access, seemed like all networks were down here. I dont follow any news (apart from HN) but from what people are saying locally, the cause is still unknown, which I guess means it can happen again at any time.
Any recommendations from preppers on a suitable portable radio? It would be nice next time to be able to distinguish rare draughty power line issues from possible start of WWIII.
I have a PL 330 as my 'is there anybody out there' armaggedon world radio receiver. I also sometimes use it just for kicks to hear radio from somewhere unreasonably far away from me.
You can find a lot of pros and cons across the different models in their offering with plenty of online discussion as well.
Look at reviews, I guess, or try and find an old grundig. I'm sure other people have other brands/models.
If I can remember the last decent one I was looking at I'll comment again, but hopefully this will set you on the right track.
And 5G internet was completely unusable during the outage. All 3 major networks immediately switched to "Emergency calls only" status and allowed zero data. So doing analysis on it isn't very useful because most people had no access and only small packets made it through (favouring more simple services). It worked maybe 10 minutes every couple of hours and very limited.
I have an Iridium backup for emergency calls too. But no internet. And was thinking of getting Starlink but I don't want it anymore since musk going nazi and also the Spanish Government seems to have dropped a 9€ per month surcharge on it.
That’s crazy that their usage is that low. Not even one visitor?
Some people even bought FM radio receivers en masse; because they work with batteries and the stations and repeaters are already set to use emergency generators.
No siesta, but:
- Lunch with the family. No phones, just the TV news.
- GMT+1 Timezone, so the sun's highest point it's at 13/14PM .
- Split work schedule because of the lunch
> SpaceX Corp. has launched six Starlink satellites that can provide internet access for smartphone users without requiring them to purchase additional hardware such as antennas.
https://siliconangle.com/2024/01/03/spacex-launches-first-si...
They don't move or anything during use, and they beamform which drastically reduces the power needed. At least this is my understanding.
The Starlink mini model is also easily powerable by battery without 220V converter.
This is not only untrue, but I would argue it also borders on being defamatory, consciously or not. Lunch breaks are typically one to two hours long in Spain, not three to four hours long--that's ridiculous. What the author is describing there would better fit what we tend to do during weekends, where "sobremesa" (coffee and drinks after we're done with the main dishes) can admittedly get a bit out of hand, but absolutely not on working days.
There's a misconception that Spanish people are 'lazy' for their late lunches, but they're eating lunch at roughly the same local solar time.
Especially during the hotter months, the streets are practically empty.
Wow.
NPR had a podcast episode (Planet Money maybe?) about how the EU was supposed to make it easier for firms to hire cross border and employees to move around. The idea was to be more like the United States.
Apparently, this didn't quite work out due to both language and cultural differences
Then, one of the guests says:
"Yes, there were some challenges. In fact, we ended up getting books with titles like: 'How to manage Spaniards if you are a German'"
I'm not trying to play dumb, but sun rises at 6 in the summer in Germany - most people take their lunch break at 12. Sun rises at, I dunno, 8? in the winter - lunch break at 12. Nothing changes and people are usually awake for a while already.
I couldn't tell you when the majority of office workers starts. I would say 9, especially as it's also averaging out 8 and 10 - but I am not sure. Do people in offices (who are not in media agencies) more typically start at 10 or 11?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24294157
I have no idea if this is true, just sounded funny to me.
If this is completely true in all cases seems questionable to me, but we did complete a project faster than the Oslo office could plan and document an identical project in Norway, resulting in an audit from the head office.
"The Germans like the Italians b/c they are fun but don't respect them b/c they are disorganized.
The Italians respect the Germans b/c they are organized but don't like them b/c they are not fun"
Don’t know if this is true.
The problem is Spain is that we have the breakfast and lunch kinda the opposite as the Brits.
Brits eat a big breakfast and a small lunch. We do the opposite. Some coffee and maybe a small pastry, and we are done for breakfast. For luch, we have a first and second dish and a dessert.
So wait when do they get work done? Do they just work later into the night?
And we are like reverse Brits.
Brits: big breakfast, small lunch.
Spain: small breakfast (coffee and a small pastry), and big lunch.
So, we aren't having siesta. We have a big gap at work to be able to feed ourselves on time.
Though I guess this might not qualify as "Spain" depending on who you ask - if I ask my neighbours if they are living in Spain they certainly will say NO :P Hot topic alert :)