[Bassilisk]

No one knows what would have happened had the blackout continued for more than one night. On the first night, even the criminals and predators were unprepared, police and emergency services would still respond, people had food and water. Already at the second day those things might start to change when phones run out of power and unrefrigerated food begins to go bad and people start to run low on water or cash.

[gus_massa]

[I agree.] We had a big electric outage in Buenos Aires in 1999. For a week, my building got light only at night, that was very useful to fill the water tank at the top. Running water is an underappreciated feature of modern life.

[xg15]

Yup. The whole thing should be treated as an extremely close near miss. They got it back up and running in a day, otherwise things could have gotten REALLY ugly.

(Though even in that hypothetical case - this wasn't a zombie apocalypse. The rest of Europe was still operating normally, so even in the worst case, there would have been ways to supply the population and restore order. But it would have been like an international response to a major natural disaster instead of only stressing out a few technicians.)