On Monday, 28 April 2025, at 10:32 UTC, Portugal and Spain plunged simultaneously into an unprecedented power blackout. Minutes later, a fabricated report purporting to be from CNN Brussels—a bureau that does not even exist—went viral, claiming that a Europe-wide cyber-attack had left several countries completely in the dark. With Portugal and Spain—two nations, 60 million inhabitants—immersed for more than twelve hours in a communications “blackout” for which no one had prepared, only the hertzian waves of radio endured, thanks to that medium’s modest power requirements. Stripped of almost every form of remote communication, people had little choice but to place blind faith in the battery-powered radios from which “facts” oscillated wildly, variously attributing the outage to Russian attacks, large-scale fires in the south of France, cyber-intrusions, or explosions at power plants in Spain. Television channels stayed on air with news broadcasts, yet no-one could watch them: there were simply no functioning sets. All we know today, in broad terms, is that the blackout caused an estimated €2 billion in losses in Portugal and that none—absolutely none—of the explanations touted on the day proved to be true.

This “perfect storm” narrative might read like a scenario crafted for a crisis drill, yet two European Union countries faced multiple concurrent crises that handbooks usually treat in isolation. While genuine events paralysed industry, services and society, the machinery of disinformation sowed chaos with false stories that did not even need an underlying agenda. Millions of spokespeople with urgent messages had no way of conveying them, and the crisis rooms that sprang up were unsure which path to follow. Some organisations resorted to posting typed notices on their doors, as though we were back in 1970.

Curiously, in the aftermath, both the H-Advisors teams on the ground and the clients they supported agreed on one point: the greatest communication challenge throughout the day—extraordinary though it may seem—was chasing after disinformation and rebutting fake news. Such is the power of falsehood today that once people have believed “any old source”, they begin to distrust every spokesman who follows. During the blackout crisis, a journalist who knows me well put me to the test to check whether I might be an AI-generated voice clone. He rang me the next day to apologise, confessing that he had been so surrounded by misinformation he had started to doubt his own shadow. Food for thought, is it not?

In a world where barely one-fifth of companies have an integrated resilience programme to ensure business continuity in a crisis—so the PwC Global Crisis & Resilience Survey 2023 tells us—what lessons can we draw from this episode? Encouragingly, we sense a growing appetite among businesses—at least in Portugal—for preparedness against disruption. Firms are increasingly aware of the urgency of having a robust crisis manual, a well-honed narrative, and properly trained spokespeople. As a result, they are now actively requesting media training programmes and crisis simulations. Yet crises have acquired new faces: cyber-attacks, ever more advanced and sophisticated, are becoming more frequent, while the rise of artificial intelligence, coupled with social media, enables any lie to scatter like a bucketful of marbles spilled onto the pavement.

During training and preparedness sessions, my clients often ask how to combat disinformation. There is no simple, factual answer to this increasingly common question. Still, I always explain that the key lies in our own story, which must be told clearly, in advance, backed by solid evidence and delivered in proximity to our audiences. Only then can we build a narrative that, though not bullet-proof, goes a long way towards earning trust.

What befell us on 28 April was so unprecedented that no amount of preparation could have worked magic. But it stands as a stark warning, a scare that must prove useful. For those who oversee communications, the blackout became a living laboratory that will serve as a reference point in training exercises, crisis plan development, and academic case studies. Let us learn from what happened and be even better prepared. That alone would be a giant step, sparing reputational and material damage which, if mishandled, could become irreversible.

Ricardo Salvo, Partner and Head of Crisis Management

H/Advisors CV&A

[email protected]