Europe’s satellite-navigation system has suffered a major outage this week, following a ‘technical incident related to its ground infrastructure.’
The network, called Galileo, went offline on Friday, meaning all receivers will not be picking up any timing or positional information.
Worryingly, this includes most smartphones , which instead must now rely on data from the American Global Positioning System, or Russian and Chinese networks.
The issue was first flagged by the European GNSS Agency (GSA) on Thursday.
The GSA said: “Experts are working to restore the situation as soon as possible.
“An Anomaly Review Board has been immediately set up to analyse the exact root cause and to implement recovery actions.”
According to specialist publication ‘Inside GNSS’, the problem lies with a fault at a Precise Timing Facility (PTF) in Italy.
As the name suggests, a PTF generates the precise time against which all close in the Galileo system are calibrated.
Galileo’s system comprises of 22 operational satellites, and is Europe’s ‘alternative’ to GPS.
The system has been live since December 2016, following 17 years of development by the European Space Agency.
How will the outage affect you?
Galileo has several functions, meaning an outage could have a direct effect on you.
Like GPS, the system provides timing and positional information to smartphones, feeding directly into navigational apps such as Maps and Google Maps.
Thankfully, during the Galileo outage, smartphones can instead use data from GPS, as well as Russian and Chinese networks.
Other uses include the synchronisation of global financial transactions, energy networks and telecommunications.
It remains unclear when the network will be back up and running.
