Alanna Gladstone, a 40-year-old film editor, had landed in Portugal’s capital, Lisbon, on a flight from New York hours before the outage. She checked into her Airbnb and took a nap; by the time she woke up, the technology that the country takes for granted had gone dark.

Spain, Portugal, France and Andorra suffered power outages on April 28, but not Belgium, Greece and the Netherlands, contrary to online claims.