16 ms·

GPS glitched across the US by as much as 33 feet

221 points by thread_id 15d ago

ck2 14d ago
not just space weather, I am pretty sure the atmosphere is being disturbed by toxic human activity both by accident and on purpose I've run outside every morning for decades and used Garmin with GPS since 2015, I've never had so much trouble Garmins finally supports dual-band (L1+L5) and BeiDou on newest models but it's still not enough to compensate, I have to use a Stryd footpod to guarantee accurate distances/speed btw BeiDou GPS blows away US GPS for number of sats and precision but despite Russia's GPS being legal in US, technically BeiDou is not * https://warontherocks.com/a-signal-point-of-failure-integrating-beidou-into-u-s-positioning-navigation-and-timing-systems/ https://warontherocks.com/a-signal-point-of-failure-integrat... * https://payloadspace.com/gps-faces-growing-competition-from-chinas-beidou/ https://payloadspace.com/gps-faces-growing-competition-from-... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeiDou#GPS_vs._BeiDou_Capabilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeiDou#GPS_vs._BeiDou_Capabili...
- deleted 14d ago
  [deleted]
- z2 14d ago
  For resiliency reasons alone, it's been proposed to allow (stop software-disabling) BeiDou in the US, but the last time this was brought up, the administration ran out of time. It's a shame, because when there is precise coverage, it enables things like lane-level city navigation. https://warontherocks.com/a-signal-point-of-failure-integrating-beidou-into-u-s-positioning-navigation-and-timing-systems/ https://warontherocks.com/a-signal-point-of-failure-integrat...
  - ck2 14d ago
    yup that was my first link but of course this administration is never going allow China-anything like low cost electric cars even if it means saving people a fortune in gas so hopefully in 2029 it can be looked at again or maybe Dems will also get the Senate too and can be petitioned if they run out of corruption investigations before 2029 it is critical to explain to everyone who isn't technical that GPS is "read only" and no data is being sent to China via BeiDou (just like it's not sent to Russia's Glonass) because that apparently is some kind of weird misunderstanding on that same note if they somehow made Starlink into a lower resolution GPS backup I'd even trust that too despite personally being anti-Musk everything
    - bigfudge 14d ago
      Read only or not, relying on Chinese or Russian gps data for increased accuracy even in civilian increases dependency no? That seems like a bad idea to me. I’ve thought for about 20 years that increasing our dependence on anti democratic regimes was a risk, no matter what the benefits for global development etc. It’s not isolationist to want to only rely on your friends and not enemies. (Which is why Europe needs to disentangle itself from the US as fast as possible).
      - z2 14d ago
        It decreases dependency on GPS and thus it decreases risk because if there's an attack on a GPS system by an adversary, it's likely that they will not be attacking their own system at the same time. I'd rather have my enemy's open source, perfectly functional clock in my back pocket than be without the time. Enjoying that the competing clock has a sub second display is optional.
      - blululu 14d ago
        If you are relying on it without a graceful fall back then it would be a problem. If you take it as a boost on top of existing capabilities then it is a pure win. In practice it can be hard to parse the two scenarios. People get used to thinking that something is available and it turns out that it was always leverage against them.
    - z2 14d ago
      Whoops I don't know how I missed that in your links! The weird part to me is that Glonass was not approved either, yet it's as openly as allowed as Galileo that went through a tedious FCC approval process that was invented later. Grandfathered or not, we're clearly not in a worse place using Russian tech for the last 15 years.
- arijun 14d ago
  > BeiDou GPS blows away US GPS for number of sats and precision Both BeiDou and GPS are supposed to be limited to 10m precision for civilians. But, going down a rabbit hole, I found that BeiDou is way more accurate than 10m--3.6m and 2.6m outside and inside the Asia-Pacific region, respectively [1]. And that's with the most simple algorithm. It goes down to ~2.5m using dual-frequencies to account for atmospheric error. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12012-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12012-y
  - myself248 14d ago
    > Both BeiDou and GPS are supposed to be limited to 10m precision for civilians. Maybe in 1998, but Selective Availability was turned off in 2000, and here in the modern era: https://rtklibexplorer.wordpress.com/2024/04/28/dual-frequency-rtk-for-less-than-60-with-the-quectel-lc29hea/ https://rtklibexplorer.wordpress.com/2024/04/28/dual-frequen...
    - arijun 14d ago
      Oh interesting, I think I conflated two things; Selective Availability and the military-only bands on GPS. While it's true that access to the military band could improve accuracy with dual-band receivers, consumer devices can use dual-band as well (as your link shows), since there are multiple unencrypted bands from navigation satellites nowadays. I am not sure how to interpret your link, though. It doesn't measure accuracy on it's own, and doesn't include a number for precision between the two units.
      - hylaride 14d ago
        My understanding is that the encrypted military-level GPS is much more robust against jamming and spoofing. There's probably a lot of capabilities we don't know that's classified, too.
        arijun 14d ago
        That is my understanding as well. But having another band allows for error correction as a side benefit.
- arijun 14d ago
  It seems that all the device manufacturers (they mention Apple, Samsung, and Google) are using BeiDou anyway. I don't know if that includes Garmin watches, though. https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-agency-probes-risks-foreign-satellite-use-by-handheld-devices-2024-03-15/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-agency-probes-risks-fo...
  - rzzzt 14d ago
    AGPS also helps if you have cell towers nearby.
    - askvictor 14d ago
      This is only to make getting a fix faster - A-GPS downloads the almanac data via the internet (fast, but needs internet) instead of directly from the GPS satellites (slow but works everywhere). It doesn't make it any more accurate.
NooneAtAll3 14d ago
were other satellite positioning systems affected as well? was it checked that it wasn't just a misconfig on US command side?
- mcpherrinm 14d ago
  The linked actual research article did look at multiple GNSS systems. GPS is presumably being reported out of familiarity https://doi.org/10.1029/2026GL124645 https://doi.org/10.1029/2026GL124645
1e1a 14d ago
Wouldn't RTK help mitigate this, as the base stations would also be affected by the atmospheric disturbance?
- jplona 14d ago
  I think so, yes. That's the main purpose of RTK
- entrope 14d ago
  Yes. WAAS should also help a lot, or at least tell you that you can't get a good position.
- Avamander 13d ago
  Adjacent to that, I'm a bit surprised that there hasn't been a mass rollout of assisted GNSS in large cities. Maybe not full RTK, but something more than just delivering almanac being delivered. Are the current GNSS solutions good enough (or too degraded?) in city jungles that there would not be any mass benefit? Too expensive to run a few base stations here and there?
Insimwytim 14d ago
TL;DR: 1. Not today. November 2025. They don't make it clear. 1.1. One would expect that to be put in the title, when the article is written almost a year after that. 1.2. No, the article doesn't state that in the first paragraph. Posting in it full seem to be the only way to fend off lazy comments: In November 2025, Earth was buffeted by several massive eruptions of solar material that slammed into the magnetosphere. That's it - the whole paragraph. Several paragraphs later - GPS first mentioned. No clear links between dates stated. 2. It is unclear what is the source of the claim. UPD: Commenter below found the source, but TFA doesn't make a good job of presenting that as a source of the 33 feet glitch claim, but rather posts another citation from it. They should've just quote this and be done with it: During the storm main phase, an east–west elongated band of intense auroral brightness expanded equatorward, producing a horizontally extended strip of strong density gradients that favored the development of small-scale irregularities. These small-scale irregularities triggered pronounced amplitude scintillations (S4 > 0.5) and caused significant positioning errors exceeding 10 m—large enough to disrupt GNSS-dependent applications across CONUS for hours, particularly precision agriculture and autonomous transportation industries. [1] 3. Navigation issues happened before, they state it right there. They were more disruptive as well. 4. The author has articles all over the topics. Everything is sensationalized. 5. Every presented link seem to have this awful Cloudflare js challenge. Bad article overall. P.S. Response to the false claim below - no, there's nothing about GPS in "the first 3 words of the article". [1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2026GL124645 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2026GL12...
- Elidrake24 14d ago
  > Not today. November 2025. They don't make it clear. My brother in christ it's the first 3 words of the article.
  - gerdesj 14d ago
    Their first line is TL;DR!
- nomel 14d ago
  > 2. It is unclear what is the source of the claim. 7th paragraph of the article states the source, and contains a link to research paper where they go into great detail.
delta_p_delta_x 14d ago
*10 metres
- rotringlvr 14d ago
  Feet are actually great units for RF because a nanosecond is very close to a foot. Since feet has many prime factors and/or the foot-meter conversion is also easy, you can quickly get a wavelength of, say a 2GHz (6 inches), and get it in cm (15cm). Of course, ideally we'd ditch the silly metric system and use natural units. Then these 30 feet are a more comfortable 50M/eV. But those SI guys are really conservative and attached to confusing unit system based on fractions of the diameter of an arbitrary planet.
  - weberer 13d ago
    I would love a new measurement system based on planck units.
    - rotringlvr 13d ago
      [dead]
  - tyffanypastecf 13d ago
    [dead]
- blululu 14d ago
  Obligatory: https://www.xkcd.com/3248/ https://www.xkcd.com/3248/
chaps 14d ago
This is exactly the sort of thing that leads to people getting reincarcerated after their electronic monitoring devices mistakenly report them leaving their homes. Some reporting I did on the topic a few years back: https://chicagoreader.com/news/many-on-house-arrest-in-cook-county-bombarded-with-texts-from-sheriffs-contractor/ https://chicagoreader.com/news/many-on-house-arrest-in-cook-...
- cromka 14d ago
  Sounds like you could be a convict, have your gang interfere GPS on a local level but enough to have other people in the neighborhood notice, make a quick run for whatever you'd need to, and still claim plausible deniability.
  - john01dav 14d ago
    Or you could cause such localized things more so to try to get a person sent back to prison or otherwise penalized intentionally
    - cromka 14d ago
      Also true.
- dataflow 14d ago
  > This As in, GPS being off by 33 feet? > leads to people getting reincarcerated I'm reading your article and it seems to be about police coming to check and realizing that the reporting of being miles away was in error, not people getting reincarcerted because of GPS incorrectly reporting they moved ~30 feet too far? One of these is much more insane than the other.
  - chaps 14d ago
    Not sure where your confusion is coming from. Have you never used GPS in a place with bad signal? Where it gets confused and you miss your turn? It's the same failure mode. Just the repercussions are getting arrested instead of getting off on the wrong exit. Also wrote this one, hopefully it helps your confusion: https://chicagoreader.com/news/false-alarms/ https://chicagoreader.com/news/false-alarms/
ashleyn 14d ago
Somehow, Selective Availability returned.
- Quibblingeek 14d ago
  Maybe not intentionally (at least by the U.S. Government, but the consequences are far greater now. Now that GPS has subsumed a large part of air navigation as more VOR and ILS approaches at non-towered airports are being left to fall into disrepair, it forces more and more aircraft operating in instrument conditions to fall back to a navigation system that may not operate to the tolerances that you need to shoot an approach to LPV minimums (which puts you close to 200 feet or so above the ground) or LNAV minimums (higher, but still pretty low to the ground). If you lose signal integrity, you abort the approach. You don't want to break out at minimums only to find that the runway is 33 feet to the left or right of the centerline when it's not a circling only approach where you're expecting it. If that field only has RNAV (GPS) approaches, you have to divert. Hopefully the alternate airport you filed has a ground based approach plate available that is authorized . When SA was around, we had more VORs, more VOR and ILS approaches, and while NDBs (decades old radionavigation beacon that operated on the AM band) were on their way out, they were still around.
  - ashleyn 14d ago
    One of the reasons SA was discontinued was that if you knew the coordinates of a base station, you could correct for the error. Are airports not doing this already?
    - Quibblingeek 14d ago
      Actually, several airports are. So you have normal WAAS and it has a ground segment. Most (new) IFR certified GPS receivers installed in airplanes today are WAAS capable. To that, you can augment something called GBAS (we used to call it Local Area Augmentation System but switched over to the ICAO name for it). It’s basically a ground station that sits at an airport and corrects for GPS errors where you need it most (airports definitely qualify here and that’s where you need the best GPS performance). Ultimately, the FAA is going to go 100% GPS and it’ll fall back to the minimum number of land-based sources for redundancy. It’s about cost. The issues with GPS may cause them to push the timeline back and develop plans to mitigate the issue, but they’re too far down this path to stop now.
aaron695 14d ago
[dead]
MarkusQ 14d ago
TFA article claims: "Indeed, the solar storm of May 2024 is estimated to have cost the US agricultural industry $500 million due to disruptions in precision navigation." This seems hard to believe. The link provided hand waves through how it maybe could happen, and ends with an Economist just SWAGing that it could have been maybe a dollar an acre or so. "He estimates that affected farms lost about $1 per acre. Nationally, this equates to an estimated half-billion dollars in lost earning potential, Griffin says." So yeah, hard to believe was the right call. Very few farms were affected, but if we assume half of the total 900 million acres of farm land were, add 10% to get a round number, and guess it at a dollar per acre, we get the quoted big number.
- sen 14d ago
  That’s how all “estimated damages” work. It’s all just made up by some random person who guesstimated a number then multiplied it by the maximum possible people effected, realistic or not.
  - Waterluvian 14d ago
    There’s probably a reasonable methodology but it has a lot of multiplications and some base parameters that make the whole thing wildly sensitive.
    - qlte 14d ago
      Yes, it's actually based on an economic model seemingly developed with a detailed understanding of modern farming practices and historical effects of timeline disruptions on yields. It may be approximate but isn't just some random dude guesstimating based on vibes or something. https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2024/05/how-will-the-gps-outage-on-may-10-affect-us-farm-profitability.html?_sp=3b5af4ec-7811-41ab-ae7e-2dcc0439b157.1788493624416 https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2024/05/how-will-the-gps-o... https://shiny.agmanager.info/cottonBotsDev/ https://shiny.agmanager.info/cottonBotsDev/
      - MarkusQ 13d ago
nwbear90 14d ago
An interesting warning as Austin is blanketed by Cybercabs. I think a town full of golden driverless cars 33 feet from where they think they should be is terrifying.
- John7878781 14d ago
  I would be shocked if Cybercabs solely rely on GPS for positioning. I imagine they look at their surrondings, etc.
  - 12_throw_away 13d ago
    I would be shocked if Tesla had properly considered and mitigated all of the single points of failure, given their track record. [1] [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-dangerous-doors/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-dangerous-door...
nubinetwork 14d ago
The gps on my phone drifts by a few city blocks all the time...
f1ay 14d ago
It seems worth mentioning that the last time GPS had issues like this afaik, it was due to the US utilizing 'selective availability' due to national security issues. We used it somewhat famously during the 9/11 attacks. Also the page 404's via archive.org, but information formerly from gps.gov can still be found here: https://archive.ph/trwOo https://archive.ph/trwOo Edit: The selective availability page moved to https://www.gps.gov/selective-availability https://www.gps.gov/selective-availability
- corndoge 13d ago
  > We used it somewhat famously during the 9/11 attacks. I have not been able to locate any source that backs up this claim.
  - globular-toast 13d ago
    Indeed, the link in the parent even says it hasn't been used since May 2000. So, yeah, it certainly wasn't used "famously". Perhaps the commenter is thinking of the fact it was used globally prior to May 1, 2000. From a civilian point of view, GPS appeared to be invented around this time but it had actually been available for a couple of decades already, just in a degraded form that wasn't very useful.
    - GJim 13d ago
      > just in a degraded form that wasn't very useful Differential GPS was already in widespread use in many counties by 2000, which made "selective ability" pointless at it provided automatic corrections to the 'degraded' GPS signal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GNSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GNSS
gm678 14d ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49500504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49500504 Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones (wsj.com) 3 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48606271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48606271 Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering (space.com) 3 months ago
NietTim 13d ago
Ah yes, 33 feet, the suspiciously not round number which suspiciously translates to almost exactly 10 meters. Just use meters, lol.
Simon_O_Rourke 13d ago
The Russians at it again no doubt. The dastards.
rimworld 13d ago
[dead]
merryocha 13d ago
I'm an Amazon driver and we heavily rely on GPS for delivering. We don't just use it for navigating, we also make each delivery inside of a geofence, and the delivery location is recorded and used for future routing. When the GPS says you're a block away from where you are, you're unable to make the delivery without contacting support. I've had days where GPS problems wasted a lot of my time, so I imagine it would be expensive if it happened across an entire region. On the other hand, these kinds of disruptions are already factored into the business model and planned for, so saying it cost an industry X amount of dollars is assuming that the industry was planning for ideal conditions in the first place.
orbital-decay 13d ago
33ft/10m seems less than the multipath error in many cases (buildings, tall forests)
DoctorOetker 13d ago
It's strange that agriculture incurred so large losses, I would expect precision farming to rely on RTK (with relatively close reference base station at a fixed location). The article doesn't mention, but how immune or affected were base station corrected RTK positioning systems? It sounds a lot less dramatic if we can absorb such events with RTK base stations. That does add the extra dependency of network links to get the RTK correction stream, unless some day it is standardized to be broadcast locally on FM or so.
- win311fwg 13d ago
  I recall that event. It wasn’t the error that was the problem, it was that the units weren’t able to get fixes amid the solar storm, rendering the machines inoperable; save driving by hand, of course, but that isn’t practical with many modern planters.
Yhippa 13d ago
Is this considered "outside-in" GPS? That is, relying on satellites orbiting the Earth? Is there such thing as "inside-out" where maybe you rely on the images of the sky above? I guess without IR or other secondary scanning technologies, that would be difficult.
- mrguyorama 13d ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_tracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_tracker It's old tech There's also the classic of dead reckoning, which is usually infeasible but modern commercial aircraft have the capability of bounded accuracy in their dead reckoning navigation for several hours at a time if needed, and if you are the US government, you can build fantastical machines to measure your own motion and dead reckon yourself to a very very tight point on the other side of the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Inertial_Reference_Sphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Inertial_Reference_Sp... That thing still has orders of magnitude better stability than common laser ring gyros as used on those airplanes, and the same for the price tag. GPS was dominant because it's cheapish and high performance and easy for a lot of contexts. However, it is critically easy to jam, for physics reasons. A jamming transmitter will always be thousands of miles closer to you than the GPS satellites are. Jamming GPS is cheap and easy, so all war will involve the denial of precision GPS guidance, so we are looking into alternative guidance again. TERCOM as used in the Tomahawk missile existed to guide them semi-inertially back in the 80s and was functional. In Ukraine, various providers have developed (supposedly) ways of using commodity cameras to watch the scenery pass by under a flying drone to ground medium quality inertial systems, to allow dirt cheap, unjammable navigation over long distances. It will be interesting how this plays out.
  - woodrowbarlow 13d ago
    fun fact: the first mass-produced consumer in-car live navigation (1981) was all dead reckoning and gyroscopes. at this point, the GPS network was operational but not available for consumer use until 1988. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_Gyrocator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_Gyrocator

221 points by thread_id 15d ago

ck2 14d ago

not just space weather, I am pretty sure the atmosphere is being disturbed by toxic human activity both by accident and on purpose I've run outside every morning for decades and used Garmin with GPS since 2015, I've never had so much trouble Garmins finally supports dual-band (L1+L5) and BeiDou on newest models but it's still not enough to compensate, I have to use a Stryd footpod to guarantee accurate distances/speed btw BeiDou GPS blows away US GPS for number of sats and precision but despite Russia's GPS being legal in US, technically BeiDou is not * https://warontherocks.com/a-signal-point-of-failure-integrating-beidou-into-u-s-positioning-navigation-and-timing-systems/ https://warontherocks.com/a-signal-point-of-failure-integrat... * https://payloadspace.com/gps-faces-growing-competition-from-chinas-beidou/ https://payloadspace.com/gps-faces-growing-competition-from-... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeiDou#GPS_vs._BeiDou_Capabilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeiDou#GPS_vs._BeiDou_Capabili...

deleted 14d ago
[deleted]
z2 14d ago
For resiliency reasons alone, it's been proposed to allow (stop software-disabling) BeiDou in the US, but the last time this was brought up, the administration ran out of time. It's a shame, because when there is precise coverage, it enables things like lane-level city navigation. https://warontherocks.com/a-signal-point-of-failure-integrating-beidou-into-u-s-positioning-navigation-and-timing-systems/ https://warontherocks.com/a-signal-point-of-failure-integrat...
- ck2 14d ago
  yup that was my first link but of course this administration is never going allow China-anything like low cost electric cars even if it means saving people a fortune in gas so hopefully in 2029 it can be looked at again or maybe Dems will also get the Senate too and can be petitioned if they run out of corruption investigations before 2029 it is critical to explain to everyone who isn't technical that GPS is "read only" and no data is being sent to China via BeiDou (just like it's not sent to Russia's Glonass) because that apparently is some kind of weird misunderstanding on that same note if they somehow made Starlink into a lower resolution GPS backup I'd even trust that too despite personally being anti-Musk everything
  - bigfudge 14d ago
    Read only or not, relying on Chinese or Russian gps data for increased accuracy even in civilian increases dependency no? That seems like a bad idea to me. I’ve thought for about 20 years that increasing our dependence on anti democratic regimes was a risk, no matter what the benefits for global development etc. It’s not isolationist to want to only rely on your friends and not enemies. (Which is why Europe needs to disentangle itself from the US as fast as possible).
    - z2 14d ago
      It decreases dependency on GPS and thus it decreases risk because if there's an attack on a GPS system by an adversary, it's likely that they will not be attacking their own system at the same time. I'd rather have my enemy's open source, perfectly functional clock in my back pocket than be without the time. Enjoying that the competing clock has a sub second display is optional.
    - blululu 14d ago
      If you are relying on it without a graceful fall back then it would be a problem. If you take it as a boost on top of existing capabilities then it is a pure win. In practice it can be hard to parse the two scenarios. People get used to thinking that something is available and it turns out that it was always leverage against them.
  - z2 14d ago
    Whoops I don't know how I missed that in your links! The weird part to me is that Glonass was not approved either, yet it's as openly as allowed as Galileo that went through a tedious FCC approval process that was invented later. Grandfathered or not, we're clearly not in a worse place using Russian tech for the last 15 years.
arijun 14d ago
> BeiDou GPS blows away US GPS for number of sats and precision Both BeiDou and GPS are supposed to be limited to 10m precision for civilians. But, going down a rabbit hole, I found that BeiDou is way more accurate than 10m--3.6m and 2.6m outside and inside the Asia-Pacific region, respectively [1]. And that's with the most simple algorithm. It goes down to ~2.5m using dual-frequencies to account for atmospheric error. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12012-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12012-y
- myself248 14d ago
  > Both BeiDou and GPS are supposed to be limited to 10m precision for civilians. Maybe in 1998, but Selective Availability was turned off in 2000, and here in the modern era: https://rtklibexplorer.wordpress.com/2024/04/28/dual-frequency-rtk-for-less-than-60-with-the-quectel-lc29hea/ https://rtklibexplorer.wordpress.com/2024/04/28/dual-frequen...
  - arijun 14d ago
    Oh interesting, I think I conflated two things; Selective Availability and the military-only bands on GPS. While it's true that access to the military band could improve accuracy with dual-band receivers, consumer devices can use dual-band as well (as your link shows), since there are multiple unencrypted bands from navigation satellites nowadays. I am not sure how to interpret your link, though. It doesn't measure accuracy on it's own, and doesn't include a number for precision between the two units.
    - hylaride 14d ago
      My understanding is that the encrypted military-level GPS is much more robust against jamming and spoofing. There's probably a lot of capabilities we don't know that's classified, too.
      - arijun 14d ago
        That is my understanding as well. But having another band allows for error correction as a side benefit.
arijun 14d ago
It seems that all the device manufacturers (they mention Apple, Samsung, and Google) are using BeiDou anyway. I don't know if that includes Garmin watches, though. https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-agency-probes-risks-foreign-satellite-use-by-handheld-devices-2024-03-15/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-agency-probes-risks-fo...
- rzzzt 14d ago
  AGPS also helps if you have cell towers nearby.
  - askvictor 14d ago
    This is only to make getting a fix faster - A-GPS downloads the almanac data via the internet (fast, but needs internet) instead of directly from the GPS satellites (slow but works everywhere). It doesn't make it any more accurate.

NooneAtAll3 14d ago

were other satellite positioning systems affected as well? was it checked that it wasn't just a misconfig on US command side?

mcpherrinm 14d ago
The linked actual research article did look at multiple GNSS systems. GPS is presumably being reported out of familiarity https://doi.org/10.1029/2026GL124645 https://doi.org/10.1029/2026GL124645

1e1a 14d ago

Wouldn't RTK help mitigate this, as the base stations would also be affected by the atmospheric disturbance?

jplona 14d ago
I think so, yes. That's the main purpose of RTK
entrope 14d ago
Yes. WAAS should also help a lot, or at least tell you that you can't get a good position.
Avamander 13d ago
Adjacent to that, I'm a bit surprised that there hasn't been a mass rollout of assisted GNSS in large cities. Maybe not full RTK, but something more than just delivering almanac being delivered. Are the current GNSS solutions good enough (or too degraded?) in city jungles that there would not be any mass benefit? Too expensive to run a few base stations here and there?

Insimwytim 14d ago

TL;DR: 1. Not today. November 2025. They don't make it clear. 1.1. One would expect that to be put in the title, when the article is written almost a year after that. 1.2. No, the article doesn't state that in the first paragraph. Posting in it full seem to be the only way to fend off lazy comments: In November 2025, Earth was buffeted by several massive eruptions of solar material that slammed into the magnetosphere. That's it - the whole paragraph. Several paragraphs later - GPS first mentioned. No clear links between dates stated. 2. It is unclear what is the source of the claim. UPD: Commenter below found the source, but TFA doesn't make a good job of presenting that as a source of the 33 feet glitch claim, but rather posts another citation from it. They should've just quote this and be done with it: During the storm main phase, an east–west elongated band of intense auroral brightness expanded equatorward, producing a horizontally extended strip of strong density gradients that favored the development of small-scale irregularities. These small-scale irregularities triggered pronounced amplitude scintillations (S4 > 0.5) and caused significant positioning errors exceeding 10 m—large enough to disrupt GNSS-dependent applications across CONUS for hours, particularly precision agriculture and autonomous transportation industries. [1] 3. Navigation issues happened before, they state it right there. They were more disruptive as well. 4. The author has articles all over the topics. Everything is sensationalized. 5. Every presented link seem to have this awful Cloudflare js challenge. Bad article overall. P.S. Response to the false claim below - no, there's nothing about GPS in "the first 3 words of the article". [1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2026GL124645 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2026GL12...

Elidrake24 14d ago
> Not today. November 2025. They don't make it clear. My brother in christ it's the first 3 words of the article.
- gerdesj 14d ago
  Their first line is TL;DR!
nomel 14d ago
> 2. It is unclear what is the source of the claim. 7th paragraph of the article states the source, and contains a link to research paper where they go into great detail.

delta_p_delta_x 14d ago

*10 metres

rotringlvr 14d ago
Feet are actually great units for RF because a nanosecond is very close to a foot. Since feet has many prime factors and/or the foot-meter conversion is also easy, you can quickly get a wavelength of, say a 2GHz (6 inches), and get it in cm (15cm). Of course, ideally we'd ditch the silly metric system and use natural units. Then these 30 feet are a more comfortable 50M/eV. But those SI guys are really conservative and attached to confusing unit system based on fractions of the diameter of an arbitrary planet.
- weberer 13d ago
  I would love a new measurement system based on planck units.
  - rotringlvr 13d ago
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- tyffanypastecf 13d ago
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blululu 14d ago
Obligatory: https://www.xkcd.com/3248/ https://www.xkcd.com/3248/

chaps 14d ago

This is exactly the sort of thing that leads to people getting reincarcerated after their electronic monitoring devices mistakenly report them leaving their homes. Some reporting I did on the topic a few years back: https://chicagoreader.com/news/many-on-house-arrest-in-cook-county-bombarded-with-texts-from-sheriffs-contractor/ https://chicagoreader.com/news/many-on-house-arrest-in-cook-...

cromka 14d ago
Sounds like you could be a convict, have your gang interfere GPS on a local level but enough to have other people in the neighborhood notice, make a quick run for whatever you'd need to, and still claim plausible deniability.
- john01dav 14d ago
  Or you could cause such localized things more so to try to get a person sent back to prison or otherwise penalized intentionally
  - cromka 14d ago
    Also true.
dataflow 14d ago
> This As in, GPS being off by 33 feet? > leads to people getting reincarcerated I'm reading your article and it seems to be about police coming to check and realizing that the reporting of being miles away was in error, not people getting reincarcerted because of GPS incorrectly reporting they moved ~30 feet too far? One of these is much more insane than the other.
- chaps 14d ago
  Not sure where your confusion is coming from. Have you never used GPS in a place with bad signal? Where it gets confused and you miss your turn? It's the same failure mode. Just the repercussions are getting arrested instead of getting off on the wrong exit. Also wrote this one, hopefully it helps your confusion: https://chicagoreader.com/news/false-alarms/ https://chicagoreader.com/news/false-alarms/

ashleyn 14d ago

Somehow, Selective Availability returned.

Quibblingeek 14d ago
Maybe not intentionally (at least by the U.S. Government, but the consequences are far greater now. Now that GPS has subsumed a large part of air navigation as more VOR and ILS approaches at non-towered airports are being left to fall into disrepair, it forces more and more aircraft operating in instrument conditions to fall back to a navigation system that may not operate to the tolerances that you need to shoot an approach to LPV minimums (which puts you close to 200 feet or so above the ground) or LNAV minimums (higher, but still pretty low to the ground). If you lose signal integrity, you abort the approach. You don't want to break out at minimums only to find that the runway is 33 feet to the left or right of the centerline when it's not a circling only approach where you're expecting it. If that field only has RNAV (GPS) approaches, you have to divert. Hopefully the alternate airport you filed has a ground based approach plate available that is authorized . When SA was around, we had more VORs, more VOR and ILS approaches, and while NDBs (decades old radionavigation beacon that operated on the AM band) were on their way out, they were still around.
- ashleyn 14d ago
  One of the reasons SA was discontinued was that if you knew the coordinates of a base station, you could correct for the error. Are airports not doing this already?
  - Quibblingeek 14d ago
    Actually, several airports are. So you have normal WAAS and it has a ground segment. Most (new) IFR certified GPS receivers installed in airplanes today are WAAS capable. To that, you can augment something called GBAS (we used to call it Local Area Augmentation System but switched over to the ICAO name for it). It’s basically a ground station that sits at an airport and corrects for GPS errors where you need it most (airports definitely qualify here and that’s where you need the best GPS performance). Ultimately, the FAA is going to go 100% GPS and it’ll fall back to the minimum number of land-based sources for redundancy. It’s about cost. The issues with GPS may cause them to push the timeline back and develop plans to mitigate the issue, but they’re too far down this path to stop now.

aaron695 14d ago

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MarkusQ 14d ago

TFA article claims: "Indeed, the solar storm of May 2024 is estimated to have cost the US agricultural industry $500 million due to disruptions in precision navigation." This seems hard to believe. The link provided hand waves through how it maybe could happen, and ends with an Economist just SWAGing that it could have been maybe a dollar an acre or so. "He estimates that affected farms lost about $1 per acre. Nationally, this equates to an estimated half-billion dollars in lost earning potential, Griffin says." So yeah, hard to believe was the right call. Very few farms were affected, but if we assume half of the total 900 million acres of farm land were, add 10% to get a round number, and guess it at a dollar per acre, we get the quoted big number.

sen 14d ago
That’s how all “estimated damages” work. It’s all just made up by some random person who guesstimated a number then multiplied it by the maximum possible people effected, realistic or not.
- Waterluvian 14d ago
  There’s probably a reasonable methodology but it has a lot of multiplications and some base parameters that make the whole thing wildly sensitive.
  - qlte 14d ago
    Yes, it's actually based on an economic model seemingly developed with a detailed understanding of modern farming practices and historical effects of timeline disruptions on yields. It may be approximate but isn't just some random dude guesstimating based on vibes or something. https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2024/05/how-will-the-gps-outage-on-may-10-affect-us-farm-profitability.html?_sp=3b5af4ec-7811-41ab-ae7e-2dcc0439b157.1788493624416 https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2024/05/how-will-the-gps-o... https://shiny.agmanager.info/cottonBotsDev/ https://shiny.agmanager.info/cottonBotsDev/
    - MarkusQ 13d ago

nwbear90 14d ago

An interesting warning as Austin is blanketed by Cybercabs. I think a town full of golden driverless cars 33 feet from where they think they should be is terrifying.

John7878781 14d ago
I would be shocked if Cybercabs solely rely on GPS for positioning. I imagine they look at their surrondings, etc.
- 12_throw_away 13d ago
  I would be shocked if Tesla had properly considered and mitigated all of the single points of failure, given their track record. [1] [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-dangerous-doors/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-dangerous-door...

nubinetwork 14d ago

The gps on my phone drifts by a few city blocks all the time...

f1ay 14d ago

It seems worth mentioning that the last time GPS had issues like this afaik, it was due to the US utilizing 'selective availability' due to national security issues. We used it somewhat famously during the 9/11 attacks. Also the page 404's via archive.org, but information formerly from gps.gov can still be found here: https://archive.ph/trwOo https://archive.ph/trwOo Edit: The selective availability page moved to https://www.gps.gov/selective-availability https://www.gps.gov/selective-availability

corndoge 13d ago
> We used it somewhat famously during the 9/11 attacks. I have not been able to locate any source that backs up this claim.
- globular-toast 13d ago
  Indeed, the link in the parent even says it hasn't been used since May 2000. So, yeah, it certainly wasn't used "famously". Perhaps the commenter is thinking of the fact it was used globally prior to May 1, 2000. From a civilian point of view, GPS appeared to be invented around this time but it had actually been available for a couple of decades already, just in a degraded form that wasn't very useful.
  - GJim 13d ago
    > just in a degraded form that wasn't very useful Differential GPS was already in widespread use in many counties by 2000, which made "selective ability" pointless at it provided automatic corrections to the 'degraded' GPS signal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GNSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GNSS

gm678 14d ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49500504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49500504 Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones (wsj.com) 3 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48606271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48606271 Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering (space.com) 3 months ago

NietTim 13d ago

Ah yes, 33 feet, the suspiciously not round number which suspiciously translates to almost exactly 10 meters. Just use meters, lol.

Simon_O_Rourke 13d ago

The Russians at it again no doubt. The dastards.

rimworld 13d ago

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merryocha 13d ago

I'm an Amazon driver and we heavily rely on GPS for delivering. We don't just use it for navigating, we also make each delivery inside of a geofence, and the delivery location is recorded and used for future routing. When the GPS says you're a block away from where you are, you're unable to make the delivery without contacting support. I've had days where GPS problems wasted a lot of my time, so I imagine it would be expensive if it happened across an entire region. On the other hand, these kinds of disruptions are already factored into the business model and planned for, so saying it cost an industry X amount of dollars is assuming that the industry was planning for ideal conditions in the first place.

orbital-decay 13d ago

33ft/10m seems less than the multipath error in many cases (buildings, tall forests)

DoctorOetker 13d ago

It's strange that agriculture incurred so large losses, I would expect precision farming to rely on RTK (with relatively close reference base station at a fixed location). The article doesn't mention, but how immune or affected were base station corrected RTK positioning systems? It sounds a lot less dramatic if we can absorb such events with RTK base stations. That does add the extra dependency of network links to get the RTK correction stream, unless some day it is standardized to be broadcast locally on FM or so.

win311fwg 13d ago
I recall that event. It wasn’t the error that was the problem, it was that the units weren’t able to get fixes amid the solar storm, rendering the machines inoperable; save driving by hand, of course, but that isn’t practical with many modern planters.

Yhippa 13d ago

Is this considered "outside-in" GPS? That is, relying on satellites orbiting the Earth? Is there such thing as "inside-out" where maybe you rely on the images of the sky above? I guess without IR or other secondary scanning technologies, that would be difficult.

mrguyorama 13d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_tracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_tracker It's old tech There's also the classic of dead reckoning, which is usually infeasible but modern commercial aircraft have the capability of bounded accuracy in their dead reckoning navigation for several hours at a time if needed, and if you are the US government, you can build fantastical machines to measure your own motion and dead reckon yourself to a very very tight point on the other side of the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Inertial_Reference_Sphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Inertial_Reference_Sp... That thing still has orders of magnitude better stability than common laser ring gyros as used on those airplanes, and the same for the price tag. GPS was dominant because it's cheapish and high performance and easy for a lot of contexts. However, it is critically easy to jam, for physics reasons. A jamming transmitter will always be thousands of miles closer to you than the GPS satellites are. Jamming GPS is cheap and easy, so all war will involve the denial of precision GPS guidance, so we are looking into alternative guidance again. TERCOM as used in the Tomahawk missile existed to guide them semi-inertially back in the 80s and was functional. In Ukraine, various providers have developed (supposedly) ways of using commodity cameras to watch the scenery pass by under a flying drone to ground medium quality inertial systems, to allow dirt cheap, unjammable navigation over long distances. It will be interesting how this plays out.
- woodrowbarlow 13d ago
  fun fact: the first mass-produced consumer in-car live navigation (1981) was all dead reckoning and gyroscopes. at this point, the GPS network was operational but not available for consumer use until 1988. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_Gyrocator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_Gyrocator