Iberian Power Outage Shows How Interconnected Networks Are: Ookla's Kehoe
An April 28 power outage in Portugal and Spain led to a widespread internet disruption in parts of Morocco, showing the interconnectedness of modern networks, Ookla industry analyst Luke Kehoe said during the company's webinar Wednesday. Morocco saw no similar power outage, but its fixed and mobile networks went down nonetheless, Kehoe noted.
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A major cause of the Moroccan outage was that one of the main subsea cable operators connecting Africa to Europe lacked “route diversity” and relied on connections through Spain, Kehoe said. “It’s not just about power” but also other factors beyond a carrier’s control. “The job really is to buy time to mitigate,” he said. “Preventing is not always possible.”
“No network is stronger than its weakest link, and failures do cut [the] availability of networks, unless they’re hardened,” Kehoe said. He cited Ookla research showing that backup power sources can reduce the impact of outages in the same way that masks and vaccines can lessen the effects of an epidemic. Batteries can buy operators “critical time” to recover from a loss of power. Ookla found that in the Iberian Peninsula, the carriers with the most backup power saw the fewest subscribers lose service, he noted.
Analyzing background signal data, “we were able to see that the collapse of the mobile site grid moved almost in lockstep with the collapse of the power grid in Spain and Portugal.”
MEO, a fixed and mobile network operator in Portugal, declared a “crisis” 23 minutes after power went out, said Manuela Coutinho, head of its global operation center. The provider, which is part of Altice Portugal, conducts many tabletop and other disaster preparedness exercises, she said. “Even though we had never tested that specific scenario of [power] blackouts, we were better able to deal with these incidents.”
MEO’s fixed-network sites had backup power that could last from several hours to several days, depending on the site, Coutinho said, while mobile sites' backup was designed to last at least six hours. It’s also very important that the core network remains stable to keep customers connected, she added.
Imelda Casey, a cybersecurity specialist at Ireland's National Cyber Security Centre, said that as a result of the digital transformation, carriers no longer have the same level of control as they did over legacy networks. That means operators need to be careful about whom they partner with on their network, she noted. “Control is being passed out to managed service providers, third-party providers,” she said. “It’s very important to understand the resilience that they have.”
Casey also said all providers should have plans for when disaster strikes. For example, her agency has coordination and response groups for different sectors, including energy, government, education and digital industries. “It brings together all the entities that operate within that sector,” she said. “For us, it’s about getting people around the table, getting them familiar with one another” and “sharing information.” The groups discuss incidents like the April outage, she said. “It’s very much taking an all-hazards approach.”