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.
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 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.
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