NOS Rejects SIRESP's €342,000 Penalty Bill From the 28 April 2025 Apagão — Telecoms Operator Says Contract Was Fully Honoured as MAI Replacement Study Slips to End-July

NOS, SGPS on Monday 2 June 2026 publicly rejected a reported €342,000 penalty claim tied to the alleged failure of the SIRESP (Sistema Integrado de Redes de Emergência e Segurança de Portugal, Integrated Network for Emergency and Security of Portugal) during the 28 April 2025 apagão (Iberian power blackout). The operator confirmed it had received no formal notification of any penalty from SIRESP, SA — the state-mandated operator of the national emergency-communications network — and that the SIC television report which first surfaced the €342,000 figure does not reflect any contractual procedure underway with NOS.

The 28 April 2025 Tape

The Iberian power blackout on 28 April 2025 took the Portuguese mainland grid offline for approximately ten hours, with knock-on losses across the SIRESP terrestrial-transmission backbone. The Autoridade Nacional de Emergência e Proteção Civil (ANEPC, National Authority for Emergency and Civil Protection) logged a sequence of communications gaps across the worst-affected period — primarily in the Centro and Alentejo civil-protection commands — and the post-event audit identified the loss of backhaul connectivity at multiple base stations as the dominant failure mode.

NOS's Contractual Position

The NOS statement frames the operator's role narrowly. NOS supplies SIRESP with terrestrial transmission services and a satellite-redundancy backbone under an existing supplier contract. NOS asserts:

• The contract was 'integralmente cumprido' (fully honoured) across the 28 April window;
• NOS has no intervention in the design, architecture or operational decisions of the SIRESP network — those responsibilities sit exclusively with SIRESP, SA;
• NOS has not been notified of any contractual penalty, and consequently the €342,000 figure circulating in the media tape does not correspond to an active disciplinary proceeding against the operator.

The SIRESP Governance Stack

SIRESP, SA — a public-capital company under the Ministério da Administração Interna (MAI, Ministry of Internal Affairs) — is the contractual operator of the national emergency-communications network. The supplier-services tape sits across multiple telecoms operators (NOS, MEO/Altice, Vodafone) plus the EID/Motorola Solutions radio-equipment stack. The legal frame for any supplier-penalty proceeding sits inside the SIRESP-operator framework contract, which requires formal notice, an opportunity for the supplier to respond and a board-level decision before any financial sanction is levied.

The Replacement Study

The post-28 April Cabinet decision booked a technical-and-strategic study for the urgent replacement of the SIRESP network — the operational architecture is reaching end-of-life across the radio backbone and the network has accumulated repeat failures across the 2024-2026 storm-and-blackout calendar. The Government's working group has a stated end-July 2026 deadline to deliver the replacement-architecture recommendation, with the procurement decision to follow in the autumn. The replacement decision will be the single most consequential telecoms-procurement of the Costa-XXV mandate.

What to Watch From Here

• The end-July replacement-architecture report. The Ministério da Administração Interna will publish the technical recommendation — broadband-LTE, satellite-redundant or hybrid — that anchors the procurement.
• The procurement budget envelope. A full SIRESP replacement is estimated at €400-€600 million across the 2027-2032 window, financing TBD.
• The Pureza pushback. Minister Maria Lúcia Amaral (MAI) has flagged that the priority is the operational replacement rather than the post-mortem attribution of blame from the 28 April apagão; that framing has drawn criticism from opposition benches.
• The supplier-penalty proceedings. If SIRESP, SA does open a formal proceeding against NOS or any other supplier, the contractual response window is 30 calendar days from formal notification.

The next concrete milestone is the MAI working group report, scheduled for end-July 2026.