On the way to the taxi we got the news, the outage was city wide. That was giving me bit of a worry for our lunch as I don't expect restaurants to keep working without electricity. This turned out to be right and wrong at the same time.

Traffic in Barcelona is a mess at best times and these weren't. But a total collapse was avoided as most traffic lights kept working, a thing a reliability enthusiast like me noted positively. But I also saw a fraying of the mobile network that frankly shocked me. I would have expected problems, but not that soon. During our 15min drive to the restaurant I had everything from excellent connectivity to no reception at all.

By the time we arrived at the restaurant, it was clear that something big was happening. We had reports of outages from Portugal, all over Spain and from Southern France at well.

2/7

As it turned out (after four floors upwards on ramps), the restaurant was completely out of commission. While they still had gass to cook, no light made the kitchen inoperable and the beverage dispenser were out of commission as well. So we went four floors down again.

At that point I presented my opinion that we would be dealing with hours of outage. Small outages can usually be fixed quickly, but nation wide is a totally different game. I said that I would be very happy, if we had electricity before sundown. I recommended to my hosts to make their way home as traffic would not get better and that I needed not to be taken care of. My hotel was about a mile away from the restaurant so we split up. This was about 13:30.

At that point I started some actions of my own:

• Phone was set to power saving mode and brightness reduced to "barely legible"
• At the next open store I bought non-alcoholic drinks and food to get me through two days
• I asked my colleagues in the SOC to go to an higher alert level

I am kind of a pessimist in such things...

3/7

At that point I had only terrible mobile phone coverage. My evaluation showed:

• I could do outgoing calls in terrible quality, but not receive incoming calls
• Text messages could neither be sent nor received
• Internet was completely down

I would love to read the post mortem from the mobile phone companies. That should not have happened within the first hour of the outage and is a big "no no" from my PoV.

As I was already three weeks in Barcelona, I noticed an unusual pedestrian traffic pattern. There were a lot more people on the streets than there were usually at this time of day. All the large stores and restaurants had closed and the patrons were pushed to the streets. People were no longer using their phones in the usual way. Usage in unsual ways was mostly shouting or staring frustrated at it.

4/7

Due to my ruined knee, it took me quite some time to get to the hotel. I arrived at about 14:30 there. At the hotel rumors were flying: Marocco, Italy and Belgium were said to be down as well and someone even said that Ireland was affected.

Connectivity was practically zero at that time. Nobody could get any web site.

I climbed 8 floors up to the rooftop bar (and explored the emergency stairs in the process), expecting the best chances for any reception there. To my surprise, the rooftop bar was operating. There were no warm dishes, but most drinks were available and cold snacks. My kudos to the staff and I will fill the tip jar very generously.

I managed to get a voice call through to @isotopp (in about 7 attempts) to get a rough briefing. That didn't look good. Expected time to recovery was 6-10 hours. Especially 10 hours would have been very bad because that meant no power till past midnight.

Over the next two hours, I scanned the WIFI spectrum. And it was awing. My hotel is located about 50m from "Las Ramblas" and usually I could get more APs than my phone could show. Now there was NOTHING AT ALL.

During that time a hotel about 400-500m from mine seems to have brought up their emergency power generator and their free WIFI went up. I managed to connect to it twice for about 5min during the next 2 hours. Whoever operates the SSID "Liceu_Opera" in #Barcelona. You have my thanks and respect.

5/7

@masek @isotopp
for those gnarly no uplink situations I built atacama for any android. instagram like p4p sharing without uplink over wlan,phone ap share.
9mb no google no bs, try out.

https://wormhole.app/ZMjzPY#zjhjKOMa5m--c41yFmL6KA