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My partner was there visiting her family in a small coastal town in Catalunya at the time of the outages. She was able to message me here in the UK for the first hour or so - as some have said before, the local cell sites were up for a while on battery backup (presumably more effective than in Aberdeenshire for example on account of ambient temperature?), and it seemed to be the backhaul to the local exchanges that was failing or becoming overwhelmed. After the mobile networks finally gave out, all that was left was broadcast radio - her neighbours would put the radios on in their cars in the street with the volume cranked up at the top of every hour to let people hear the news bulletins.
In terms of Meshtastic etc., there’s not really much chance of it being able to integrate with or replace any fixed telecom infrastructure - I think the idea that most people thinking of using Meshtastic in a “prepper” sense is that it’ll allow them a way to contact friends/relatives should fixed infrastructure become unavailable for whatever reason. While I’ve enjoyed messing about with it as part of my learning about radio, I definitely wouldn’t see it being robust enough to last long in the event of any major outage. It’s already quite prone to getting clogged with spammy packets, either with folk setting up their nodes incorrectly, or occasional nodes going haywire all by themselves.
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