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.

The countries’ top officials were trying to determine the cause of an outage that left tens of millions of people across the Iberian Peninsula without power.