Most of us live in areas where we grow up and expect services to operate and for the most part they do. When we wake up, we turn on a light to see and the electricity is there to operate the light and life goes on. Everyday that action happens, our expectations grow that it will continue into the future. When it does not, we are somewhere between surprised and outraged that the service is not there.

In an article by Jose Bautista, Jenny Gross and John Yoon of the New York Times News Service, in the countries of Spain and Portugal, the electricity went off for 18 hours. No one really knows what happened, but many investigates are going on.

Sara Aagesen, one of Spain’s Vice Presidents said we are collecting thousands of data points from the energy system to shed light on what happened.

President of Spain met with the National Security Council officials and the Council of Ministers to discuss the outages.

The Spanish government had not ruled out a cyberattack on the transmission grid, even though Red Electrica, Spain’s grid operator said there was no evidence of one.

The National Cryptologic Center which oversees cyberthreats was also investigating and a judge ordered reports within 10 days from Red Electrica, the intelligence services and the police.

The International Energy Agency in Paris noted there have been relatively few instances of disruption due to cyberattack, the issues are often related to equipment failures, operational errors and effects of storms.

After power was restored, Spain’s Interior Ministry downgraded the threat level from extreme to medium to normal.

Prime Minister Luis Montenegro of Portugal said after an emergency government meeting, it appears there was an abrupt increase in voltage in the Spanish grid which caused safety mechanism to kick it that led to the blackout.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, one of the things as investors you believe is there are systems in place when something goes wrong. It may be nothing illegal but there are multiple groups of knowledgeable people who can review the data and make a determination and hopefully it does not happen again. One of the ways you can determine this is how did the company react to threats that are made public. Was the problem solved? how long did it take? and how much did it cost the company?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.