I live close to Lisbon (in the South margin of the Tagus river) and I can say Meshtastic was very active throughout the outage.
I received news of power coming back in the first few towns through it, before FM radio.
I needed to get closer to the river to get reliable contacts, but I've now ordered a nice antenna and a solar kit to mount a repeater in a mast on my roof so I can cover the center of my town more reliably.
Isn't Starlink using country-local ground stations for the Internet connectivity? Likely they had power-backup but could it switch to foreign country stations?
They have lasers on the satellites so they can relay to another ground station. I "come out" in either Dallas or Georgia somewhere. Once I exited in Wyoming or thereabouts.
It’s wild how different experiences can be of the same thing - we didn’t even realise anything was amiss until we went to pick our kid up from kindergarten, and everyone was stood around on the streets looking a bit lost.
We live off grid - independent power supply, starlink, no cell reception in our valley, EV charged off the panels. Just another day.
Worryingly, after about four hours of power cut the local town had already run out of water (they pump up to a relatively small (100m3) holding tank), so we donated our stash in the car to the kindergarten for the kids staying later.
No run on the banks here though - we are super rural and pretty much everyone keeps wads of cash (land deals etc. are almost always done with the official bit and the under the table bit) and has a full pantry at home.
