Business Vulnerability in Focus: What the Iberian Power Outage Teaches Us About Resilience

This week, large parts of Spain and Portugal experienced significant electricity outages, disrupting businesses, transportation, healthcare, and daily life. While the immediate cause is still under investigation, the broader message is clear: critical infrastructure resilience is no longer a technical topic — it is a core business survival issue.

Modern supply chains, digital operations, and customer services all depend on seamless infrastructure. When the grid fails, the impact isn’t limited to utilities — it cascades across industries, halting manufacturing, delaying logistics, disabling communications, and eroding customer trust. In an interconnected economy, a disruption in one sector quickly becomes a disruption across many.

The events in Iberia highlight a growing truth: business resilience cannot be separated from infrastructure resilience. Companies that still treat resilience as a reactive insurance policy — rather than a proactive investment — expose themselves to operational paralysis and strategic loss.

Leadership teams today must ask:

• How dependent are our critical operations on single points of failure?

• How do we prepare for cascading impacts beyond our immediate control?

• How fast can we pivot, recover, and maintain trust when infrastructure breaks?

The Iberian outage reminds us: resilience is no longer about predicting every risk — it’s about building adaptive strength for a world where risks are inevitable. The businesses that lead the next decade will be those that embed resilience at the heart of their strategy — starting now.