Europe's record-breaking heatwave left around 68,000 households without electricity in northwestern France on Wednesday, authorities said, in the country's first major power outage of the latest bout of extreme weather. The outage, which involved a transformer on the electricity grid, was related to extreme temperatures and did not injure anyone, the prefecture in the coastal department of Finistere said in a statement. France recorded its hottest day ever Tuesday as an early heat wave gripped Europe, prompting the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre museum to restrict visiting hours and disrupting school and transportation schedules in multiple countries.
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Cover image: La gente se refresca en la Fuente del Trocadero, junto a la Torre Eiffel en París, mientras las temperaturas suben durante una ola de calor que afecta a gran parte de Francia, 22 de junio de 2026. © Reuters- Abdul Saboor
The outage in Brittany took place around 9:00 pm (1900 GMT) on Tuesday in the commune of Ergue-Gaberic near the city of Quimpe, the prefecture said. While teams from French grid operators RTE and Enedis had worked through the night to fix the issue, power is not expected to be restored in full until the end of the day at the earliest. Up to 106,000 clients of the French power network were left without power by late Tuesday, as the continent's sweltering heatwave pushed the country into its hottest day ever. "For technical reasons, RTE will not be able to re-connect the affected households during the course of the day; connections will be made, at the earliest, by the end of Wednesday," the operator said. Read moreFrance’s latest heatwave: ‘Temperatures will fall, and we won’t talk about it anymore’ Finistere is one of 58 French departments under the highest red alert for extreme heat on Wednesday, with temperatures of 39C to 41C expected on Wednesday from Brittany to the Paris region. The extreme weather is being driven by atmospheric and circulation patterns that keep hot air trapped in place for days, with these factors worsened by global warming, experts say. Tuesday's record of 29.8C (85.6 F) for France’s national thermal indicator – an average of temperatures measured at 30 weather stations – is only the latest in a series of never-before-registered highs heaped on Europe's largest country, with severe conditions likely to persist at least until the weekend.
