Iberian Blackout⬛

The lights went out. Millions of people across Spain and Portugal woke up to an old-fashioned nightmare this week, where power and water were unavailable. Transport? You’d be lucky.

For those of us in tech, it’s a reminder. Your system is always only as strong as its weakest point.

Software Frailties

We spend our careers building complex systems on top of increasingly abstract, fragile layers. Everything is built on another layer, Kubernetes clusters, serverless APIs and distributed databases. The list goes on.

We need secure, stable systems. We need to have software we can rely on. Yet that unsecured API endpoint can mean an end to everything. This week some software developers learned a harsh truth; without power your software does nothing.

Spanish Practices

The Madrid Open was plunged into darkness. People got stuck in elevators. Even ATMs were useless. The sight of people queuing up for cash would be hilarious if it weren’t so bleak.

It’s 2025 do even if people can pull out a few Euros there is little to spend it on because stores can’t open their tills.

Your gas-guzzling car works fine, but where can you get fuel when the gas station pumps are down?

It’s a problem that our modern lives are one bad day away from collapsing like a badly QA’d release. 

Freak Occurrences?

The Iberian blackout wasn’t just a freak incident. Europe’s last comparable outage was in 2003. That’s two major continent-spanning failures in about twenty years. Look me in the eyes and tell me your startup’s disaster recovery plan covers that.

Because our companies might be resilient, but they can’t mitigate every possible risk. Which sounds exactly like software, but with one major difference. Software engineering loves to pretend that we are immune to the real world, but the truth is very far from that assertion. A cable might burn out, or a hacker might find a vulnerability in a third-party dependency.

You might have worked for companies that preach about “five nines uptime” and “zero downtime deployments” but that’s not true. Now show me the slide deck on what happens when there’s literally no power.

No power, no product. No product, no revenue. No revenue… 

The shouting from the powers that be that the outage wasn’t a cyber attack telling. We’ve built systems so fragile we can’t even imagine a dumb mechanical failure anymore.

It’s time we had a risk register that actually would help. If we thought about those edge cases and actually put in mitigation perhaps the worst will not happen.

But there again, you might still suffer a power outage. Not much you can do about that.

Conclusion

Don’t panic. The meeting invites for the standup were accepted weeks ago. 

It will start on time. Oh. Nobody could log on.