Resilience lessons from the April 2025 Iberian Peninsula outage

Takeaways - July 2025

Over the last five years, focus on operational resilience has grown significantly, in particular as a result of regulatory focus and a highly turbulent external environment.

The electricity outage that occurred across the Iberian Peninsula on 28 April 2025 was a real-life example of a systemic event that could have had significant consequences. It affected telecommunications, transit and all other critical infrastructure. Financial services firms’ business continuity plans (BCPs) kicked in quickly and effectively, but it is unclear what the impact would have been had electricity not been restored within 24 hours.

Following the event, ORX brought together representatives from firms either headquartered or with entities located in the region to share operational resilience lessons learned. These revolved especially around critical processes and/or services, and the ecosystem within which financial firms operate. Whatever the root cause, the agreement was that the event served as a valuable reminder of the importance of being operationally resilient and being prepared for the unexpected.

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