Power mostly restored in Spain and Portugal after huge outage

Power has mostly been restored to parts of Spain, Portugal and France, after huge power cuts affected the countries.

Around 99% of power has now been restored in Spain, according to Red Electrica, Spain's power operator.

In Portugal, around 6.2 million out of 6.5 million households have electricity again, according to REN - the national grid operator - and it hopes to have everything working again by the end of Tuesday.

The massive power cut caused widespread disruption, and in Spain, a state of emergency was declared.

Homes, schools, businesses, trains, traffic lights and bank card payments were all affected, and mobile phone networks went down in parts of Spain too.

Meanwhile, in Portugal, airlines told passengers not to travel to airports until further notice.

Authorities say they're still trying hard to get power running normally again, but are also trying to figure out why the power cuts happened.

Spain's King Felipe said a national security meeting would take place to find out what caused the power cut, and Portuguese Prime Minister Luís Montenegro said there was "no indication" that the power cut was caused by a cyber-attack.

At one international school in Lisbon, Portugal, a teacher told the BBC she had been "teaching in the dark" after the power went off at around midday on Monday.

"Lots of parents are taking their children out due to the power cuts," she said. "It was flashing on and off for a long while but seems to have finally given up."

At a school in Spain's capital, Madrid, a teacher said the problems began affecting her school and the area it's in at around 12:45 local time (11:45 UK time) on Monday, but that "luckily" lunches had already been cooked for the children.

She also said pupils at her school were aware there's a power blackout but didn't know what was going on as they can't use phones on school premises and don't have access to Wi-Fi.

Sport was affected too, with play suspended at the Madrid Open - an annual tennis tournament.

British tennis player Jacob Fearnley had to leave the court after the loss of power affected scoreboards and a camera above the court.

Andorra and parts of France were also affected - although French authorities say the power came back on quickly - but the Spanish islands of Ibiza, Mallorca and Menorca seem not to have been affected.

In Portugal, police say traffic lights also went down, and some public transport in Lisbon and Porto were closed with some airports also affected.