Europe's Galileo satellite navigation system largely regained service Thursday, a full week after a mass outage began on July 11. The European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency, known as GSA, said that commercial users would start to see coverage returning, but that there might be "fluctuations" in the system. What remains unclear is what exactly caused the downtime—and why it persisted for so long.
The incident took down all of the GPS-like system's timing and navigation features other than "Search and Rescue," which helps locate people in remote areas. As the days dragged on, what might have simply been an inconvenient blip ballooned into a major incident. And while European systems and services can still fall back to other timing and navigation options, like GPS, the prolonged outage serves as a chilling reminder of the modern world's intrinsic reliance on fallible global positioning systems.
Lily Hay Newman covers information security, digital privacy, and hacking for WIRED.
The Galileo system launched in 2016, and has been in initial testing phases since. It represents an $11 billion investment by the EU, with the goal of becoming an alternative to navigation options like GPS, run by entities like the US Air Force, the Russian system GLONASS, or China's BeiDou. The European Commission has been working to find almost $18 billion in new funding for the EU's 2021 to 2027 space programs, including Galileo. There are more than 100 million devices that can receive Galileo's signal, but nearly all are programmed to fall back on GPS. If they weren't, the week of outages would have caused a massive humanitarian crisis.
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