Spain and Portugal power outage: what caused it, and was there a cyber-attack?

Spain, Portugal and some of south-west France suffered a massive power cut on Monday, with major cities including Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon among those affected.Houses, offices, trains, traffic lights and even the Madrid open tennis tournament were all hit, causing chaos for millions of people and prompting a scramble by the Spanish and Portuguese governments and network operators to understand the problem and race to fix it.Red Eléctrica de España (REE), Spain’s electric network, said Spain and Portugal were hit by “el cero” – the zero. Its Portuguese counterpart, Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN), said the outage started at 11:33am Western European summer time.By mid-afternoon the Spanish operator, which is partly state-owned, said that it had started to recover voltage in the north, south and west of the Iberian peninsula

Forget the silly IPO price. Deliveroo would be right to take DoorDash’s money and run

If one didn’t know Deliveroo’s stock market history, a take-out price of £2.7bn for a barely profitable food delivery app would seem a decent piece of business from the seller’s point of view. The qualification, of course, is that the likely 180p-a-share offer from DoorDash of the US stacks up poorly against the 390p at which Deliveroo listed in 2021.The moral of the numbers, though, is surely only that the flotation, or IPO market in early 2021 was infected by Covid-19 silliness. Almost everything was listed at over-inflated prices in a weird period when fund managers seemed to have lost the ability to say no to smooth-talking investment bank promoters

US tariff war hurting trade with China; M&S cyber-attack crisis continues; FTSE 100 rises for 11th day running – as it happened

Sky News are reporting that hundreds of agency staff at Marks & Spencer’s main clothing and home warehouse in the East Midlands have been told not to come in.That highlights the disruption being cause by the huge M&S cyber-attack, which has led to the suspension of online orders last week.Exclusive: Marks & Spencer has told hundreds of agency workers at its huge Castle Donington distribution centre in the East Midlands not to come into work as Britain's best-known retailer grapples with the unfolding impact of a major cyberattack. https://t.co/hBK3eUvbiUTime to wrap up:Donald Trump’s increasingly erratic trade war has triggered a slump in shipments to the US’s most important ports, amid the growing risk of a recession in the world’s largest economy

EU microchip strategy ‘deeply disconnected from reality’, say official auditors

The EU’s strategy to secure its own supply of microchips is “deeply disconnected from reality”, a damning report by the official European court of auditors (ECA) has found.The ECA reported that the bloc was “very unlikely” to meet its 2030 target of supplying 20% of the world’s microchips at a time when global demand for semiconductors is booming to meet the growing needs of defence, green tech and artificial intelligence.With Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on chips imported to the US, there is also potential for “collapse of supply chains”, the ECA said, making the EU more vulnerable, despite tech multinationals such as California’s Intel and South Korea’s Samsung having bases in Europe.“The EU urgently needs a reality check in its strategy for the microchips sector,” said Annemie Turtelboom, who was in charge of the ECA audit.A European Commission paper in 2022 set out the bloc’s ambition to take a 20% share of the chip market, a share reflecting the percentage of global end users located in Europe

Producer of Peaky Blinders and Big Brother ‘drafts bid’ for ITV

The French entertainment business behind Peaky Blinders, Banijay Group, is reportedly drawing up plans for a takeover offer for ITV or its studio arm.The group, which has also produced Big Brother, has held early talks with ITV about buying the whole business or just its studio production division, according to reports.ITV Studios is one of the world’s biggest production companies, making shows for the UK commercial public broadcaster as well as selling content to other platforms such as the BBC and Netflix. It produced Disney’s Rivals, Netflix’s thriller Fool Me Once and the BBC’s Showtrial.There has been persistent speculation about the possible sale of ITV Studios

Deliveroo shares surge after £2.7bn DoorDash takeover move

Shares in Deliveroo have risen by 17% as investors reacted to a $3.6bn (£2.7bn) takeover offer by the rival food delivery app DoorDash that could net its founder more than £170m.Deliveroo said on Friday after the UK stock market had closed that it had received a takeover proposal from DoorDash, the biggest delivery app in the US, on 5 April. It said it would probably recommend a possible 180p a share offer to investors, if DoorDash made a firm offer