 Over the next half-hour, the power first went down but then it crept back up.E.ON Netz thought that closing a bus tie would decrease this a bit; in fact, it had the opposite effect and once this was performed the line tripped out.Twenty eight seconds later, an electrical blackout had cascaded across Europe extending from Poland in the north-east, to the Benelux countries and France in the west, through to Portugal, Spain and Morocco in the south-west, and across to Greece and the Balkans in the south-east.