What happened on June 23?
On June 23, 2026, Britain experienced temperatures exceeding 34 degrees Celsius. The National Energy Systems Operator (Neso), which maintains the UK electricity grid, was using every available source of power to meet demand. According to reporting by Oliver Wright in The Times (paywalled: thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/uk-blackouts-risk-heatwave-7jj2lh876), whistleblowers within Neso have alleged that the grid fell outside its safe operating limits for multiple periods that day.
The significance of that claim is stark. Operating outside safe limits means that if any single major source of generation had failed at that moment, an automatic system shutdown would have triggered power cuts across the country. Britain has not experienced a major blackout since 2019. On June 23, The Times reports that we came far closer than the public was told.
The UK is not alone in this vulnerability. An unprecedented blackout left Spain and Portugal without power for several hours in 2025. The question is no longer whether a major grid failure is possible. It is whether your organisation would cope if one happened here.
What would a grid failure actually mean for organisations?
A major blackout is not just an inconvenience. It is a cascading operational failure that unfolds faster than most organisations are prepared for.
The immediate impact is loss of power to buildings, facilities, and systems. But within minutes, the consequences multiply. Lighting fails. Access control systems go offline. Lifts stop. CCTV drops. Communications infrastructure, including mobile networks that rely on powered base stations, begins to degrade as backup batteries deplete. Data centres fall to UPS power. Manufacturing lines halt. Cold chain integrity is immediately at risk.
For organisations with duty of care obligations to staff, contractors, or members of the public, the loss of power creates an accountability problem alongside the operational one. Who is on site? Where are they? Are they safe? How do you reach them if your normal communication channels are affected?
The longer the outage lasts, the more complex the response becomes. Staff may need to be evacuated from buildings without functioning lifts or lighting. Sites with vulnerable people, including hospitals, care facilities, and university accommodation, face acute welfare challenges. Industrial sites with live processes face safety risks that require immediate human response.
Which sectors face the greatest exposure?
Every organisation that depends on continuous power is exposed, but some face acute consequences.
Energy and utilities operators face the paradox of being both the cause of and the victim of a major grid failure. Their own operational technology may be affected at the same moment they are expected to respond.
Healthcare and care providers face immediate risks to patients and residents dependent on powered equipment. The duty of care in a prolonged blackout is demanding and the regulatory scrutiny that follows is severe.
Airports and transport hubs manage thousands of members of the public in complex physical environments where power failure disrupts everything from check in systems to airside security.
Financial services firms face operational resilience obligations under FCA PS21/3 and DORA that explicitly require them to demonstrate continuity of important business services in severe but plausible scenarios. A major blackout is now firmly in that category.
Local authorities and Category 1 responders under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 have statutory obligations to respond to major emergencies. A grid failure affecting their own operational infrastructure at the same moment they are expected to lead the public response is a particularly difficult scenario.
Defence contractors and private security operators managing critical infrastructure or client sites face simultaneous demands from multiple locations with degraded communications.
What should organisations do to prepare?
Preparation for power failure has three distinct phases: before, during, and after.
Before an event, organisations need to know their exposure. Which sites have backup generation? For how long? Which critical systems are on UPS? Which populations, whether staff, contractors, or the public, are on site at any given time and how would you account for them if normal systems failed? Most organisations have partial answers to these questions. Very few have a single, accessible operational picture.
During an event, the priority is accountability and communication. The first question is always who is affected, and the answer has to come from live data rather than guesswork. The second is how to reach them, across multiple channels, simultaneously, with clear protective action guidance. The third is command: who has declared the incident, what the response objectives are, and who is doing what.
After an event, organisations face regulatory scrutiny, insurance claims, and in some cases public inquiries. The evidence required is a complete, timestamped record of every decision made, every communication sent, and every action taken. That record cannot be reconstructed after the fact from memory and fragmented logs. It has to be built in real time as the event unfolds.
How does AtlasNXT support organisations during a power failure?
AtlasNXT is a critical event management platform that brings together incident management, mass notification, and real time tracking into a single operational picture. In a power failure scenario, it addresses the three core problems every organisation faces: knowing who is affected, reaching them, and coordinating the response.
When an incident is declared, an Incident Room opens immediately. All authorised stakeholders, whether in the same building or distributed across multiple sites, share the same live operational view. Tasks are assigned and tracked. Updates flow into a single chronological record. The response is coordinated, not improvised.
Mass notification reaches affected staff and contractors simultaneously across multiple channels, including SMS, push notification, email, and voice. In a degraded communications environment where email servers may be offline and Wi-Fi has failed, multi channel notification to mobile devices is what gets through. Confirmation tracking identifies who has acknowledged the notification and escalates automatically for anyone who has not responded.
Real time tracking gives incident commanders the population accountability picture they need: who is on site, where they are, and who cannot be accounted for. Welfare check ins can be sent to individuals in affected areas and non-responders escalated without requiring manual triage.
Why mobile first capability is non-negotiable in a power crisis
A power failure that takes down your office infrastructure also takes down the systems your response team would normally use: desktop computers, desk phones, on-premise servers, and building management systems. The response has to be mobile from the first moment.
AtlasNXT is designed to be able to be operated from a phone. An operator can manage an incident, send messages, and monitor the live response, all from their mobile device. They do not need to be at a desk, in a control room, or even on site.
This matters particularly in a scenario where the power failure itself may prevent access to or egress from affected buildings. The ability to command a response remotely, with a complete operational picture, from a device running on battery power and mobile data is not a feature. It is the baseline requirement for any serious critical event management capability. In the event of a power failure that also disables GSM towers, consider using AtlasNXT with a combination of a Starlink Mini, and a PeakDo LinkPower 2 battery, which will allow you to retain full mobile command of a situation without any additional power for at least four hours.
For organisations with multiple sites or a distributed workforce, mobile command means that the response is not dependent on any single physical location being accessible or powered. The incident record, the notifications, the tracking, and the task management all continue to function as long as mobile or Starlink connectivity is available.
What does good preparation look like?
The organisations that will cope best with a major blackout are those that have already integrated critical event management into their operational planning rather than treating it as a response-only tool.
That means knowing their population baseline before an event occurs. It means having mass notification lists that are accurate and segmented. It means having tested their incident management workflow, including the mobile command capability, before they need it under pressure. And it means having the audit trail infrastructure in place so that when the lights come back on, they can demonstrate exactly what they did and why.
The June 23 near-miss was a warning. The grid is under pressure in ways that are not always visible to the organisations that depend on it. The question every resilience, security, and operations leader should be asking now is not whether this will happen, but how well prepared they will be when it does.
AtlasNXT provides the incident management, mass notification, and real time tracking capability that organisations need to respond effectively when critical infrastructure fails. Get in touch to see how AtlasNXT supports power failure preparedness across your sites.
Source: Oliver Wright, The Times, "Britain came perilously close to blackouts during last month's heatwave" (paywalled): thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/uk-blackouts-risk-heatwave-7jj2lh876
