Exclusive Airbus is overhauling its datacenter contingency plans after a ten-hour power outage across Spain and Portugal in April nearly forced a complete production shutdown.
The blackout – one of the worst in Iberian history – was triggered by voltage surges that overwhelmed the electrical grid. It knocked out traffic lights, forced metro evacuations, and impacted Airbus's primary Spanish datacenter in Madrid, part of its Campus Futura aerospace and defense hub.
"We thought we were ready for an electrical issue, and in fact we were not," Catherine Jestin, Airbus Executive Vice President of Digital, told The Register.
Despite backup generators, Airbus faced a critical fuel shortage. The company scrambled to order more diesel, but fuel suppliers were overwhelmed with calls from other affected customers. "We were a few hours from a datacenter shutdown," Jestin said.
The stakes were high. Without datacenter access, production workers couldn't retrieve documentation or instructions. Even warehouse operations would have stalled if automated parts retrieval systems went offline.
"Probably we could have survived one day," Jestin added, noting that the company resorted to manual workarounds.
The incident has "triggered an improvement plan." Airbus is now ensuring adequate generator fuel reserves and priority supply contracts across its facilities in Spain, France, Germany, and the UK. The goal is to maintain operations for several days during a "massive blackout" without relying on external fuel deliveries.
This may involve paying a premium for the fuel to power backup generators, yet pales into insignificance compared to the potential cost of halting a production line.
The outage in late April was a very rare event. Portugal's national grid operator said at the time: "Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as induced atmospheric vibration. These oscillations caused synchronization failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network." ®
Source: The register