EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in mysterious outage

EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in mysterious outage

EU's Galileo global navigation satellite system nears 100 hours of downtime.

By  |   


Galileo, the EU's global navigation satellite system, has been down for four days, since July 11, following a mysterious outage. All Galileo satellites are still non-operational, at the time of writing.
According to a service status page, 24 of the 26 Galileo satellites are listed as "not usable," while the other two are listing a status of "testing," which also means they're not ready for real-world usage.

The European GNSS Agency (GSA), the organization in charge of Galileo, has not published any information in regards to the root of the outage, which began four days ago, on Thursday, July 11.
On that day, the GSA published an advisory on its website alerting companies and government agencies employing the Galileo system that satellite signals have degraded and they "may not be available nor meet the minimum performance levels."

The agency warned that the Galileo system "should be employed at users' own risk."
The GSA published a more dire warning on Saturday, July 13, when it said that Galileo was experiencing a full-service outage and that "signals are not to be used."

At the time of writing, the service is nearing 100 hours of downtime.
The system going down forced the Galileo's userbase (government agencies and private companies) to switch to alternatives.
The Galileo satellite system was launched in 2016 and was funded by the EU as an alternative to the US Air Force's Global Position System (GPS) and the Russian government's GLONASS.

It is provided under both free and commercial offerings and is widely used by governments agencies and private companies for navigation and search and rescue operations.
Because it's provided for free, it is also widely used by the private tech sector and by most of the world's academia.
The downtime also comes after widespread GPS outages were reported across Israel, Iran, Iraq, and Syria at the end of June. Israeli media blamed the downtime on Russian interference, rather than a technical problem.

Updated on July 15, 5:30am ET: In a statement published after this article's publication, the GSA blamed the Galileo outage on "a technical incident related to its ground infrastructure." The agency said that the search and rescue (SAR) feature -- used for locating and helping people in distress situations for example at sea or mountains -- remained operational during the outage, which impacted only navigational and satellite-based timing services.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/european-gps-satellites-have-been-down-for-four-days-in-mysterious-outage/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New ATM's: withdraw money with veins in your finger

New cash machines: withdraw money with veins in your finger Cash machine technology that reads the pattern of finger veins is already available in Japan and Poland   By Telegraph Reporters 6:59PM BST 15 May 2014 Cash machines could soon be installed with devices that identify customers by reading the veins in their fingers. The technology is already being rolled out in Poland, where 1,730 cash machines will this year be installed with readers, negating the need for a debit card and Pin. Developed by Hitachi, the Japanese electronics firm, the machines read the patterns of the veins just below the surface of the skin on your finger using infra-red sensors. The light is partially absorbed by haemoglobin in the veins to capture a unique finger vein pattern profile, which is matched to a profile. The technology is used by Japanese banks and also in Turkey, offering “groundbreaking levels of accuracy and speed of authentication”, Hitachi said, which in t...
Read more

The City That’s Trying to Replace Politicians With Computers (It’s Working)

The City That’s Trying to Replace Politicians With Computers (It’s Working) After sneaking his AI-written water bill into law, Ramiro Rosário says government press-release writers could go, too By Samantha Pearson and Luciana Magalhaes Dec. 22, 2023 8:58 am ET PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil — In a country with a history of corruption and government inefficiency, Councilman Ramiro Rosário has come up with what he believes is a winning strategy to improve the work of politicians: replace them with computers. The 37-year-old legislator in Brazil’s southern city of Porto Alegre passed the country’s first law in November that was written entirely by ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence chatbot developed by the San Francisco startup OpenAI. The law itself was purposefully boring—a proposal to stop the local water company from charging residents for new water meters when they were stolen from their front yards. It would easily pass, calculated Rosário. One recent day, donning jeans and sneakers...
Read more

Will AI replace doctors who read X-rays, or just make them better than ever?

Will AI replace doctors who read X-rays, or just make them better than ever? As AI moves into medicine, perhaps no one has more to gain or lose than radiologists, the doctors who review medical scans for signs of cancer and other diseases By MATTHEW PERRONE AP Health Writer May 14, 2024, 9:16 AM ET WASHINGTON -- How good would an algorithm have to be to take over your job? It’s a new question for many workers amid the rise of ChatGPT and other AI programs that can hold conversations, write stories and even generate songs and images within seconds. For doctors who review scans to spot cancer and other diseases, however, AI has loomed for about a decade as more algorithms promise to improve accuracy, speed up work and, in some cases, take over entire parts of the job. Predictions have ranged from doomsday scenarios in which AI fully replaces radiologists, to sunny futures in which it frees them to focus on the most rewarding aspects of their work. That tension reflects how AI is rollin...
Read more