France outage leaves 68,000 homes without power as record heatwave spreads north
Key takeaways
- By: FRANCE 24 A woman shields herself from the sun with a fan in the Breton city of Rennes, in western France, on June 22, 2026.
- 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.
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A power outage caused by a record-breaking heatwave left around 68,000 households without electricity in France's western Brittany on Wednesday as the national weather agency issued a red alert for extreme weather covering most of the country, including the northernmost region around Calais.
By: FRANCE 24 A woman shields herself from the sun with a fan in the Breton city of Rennes, in western France, on June 22, 2026. © Jeremias Gonzalez, AP 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.