Hacker News

GPS glitched across the US by as much as 33 feet

76 points by thread_id 22 hours ago | 25 comments

chaps 3 hours 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-...

cromka 40 minutes 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 35 minutes 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 19 minutes ago

Also true.

1e1a 3 hours ago

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

ashleyn 2 hours ago

Somehow, Selective Availability returned.

delta_p_delta_x 3 hours ago

*10 metres

NooneAtAll3 3 hours ago

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

mcpherrinm 3 hours 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

aaron695 2 hours ago

[dead]

Insimwytim 3 hours 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/10.1029/2026GL12...

kbelder 2 hours ago

>P.S. A separate comment would be too much to respond to the false claim below - no, there's nothing about GPS in "the first 3 words of the article".

He's talking about your first (incorrect) claim. The article begins "In November 2025"

nomel 2 hours 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.

Elidrake24 3 hours ago

> Not today. November 2025. They don't make it clear.

My brother in christ it's the first 3 words of the article.

ck2 3 hours 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-integrat...

* https://payloadspace.com/gps-faces-growing-competition-from-...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeiDou#GPS_vs._BeiDou_Capabili...

arijun 2 hours 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

myself248 2 hours 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-frequen...

arijun 2 hours 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 2 hours 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.

pkaye 6 minutes ago

I think the new US GPS satellites have ability to do a spot beam of increased strength in a region of interest.

IndySun 44 minutes ago

Called M-Code.

Has a fascinating history.

https://odimpact.org/case-united-states-opening-gps-data-for...

arijun 48 minutes ago

That is my understanding as well. But having another band allows for error correction as a side benefit.

z2 3 hours 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-integrat...

ck2 3 hours 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

arijun 2 hours 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-fo...

rzzzt 36 minutes ago

AGPS also helps if you have cell towers nearby.