EU’s satellite navigation system fully offline

The EU's satellite navigation system, developed as an alternative to the United States' GPS, is fully offline due to "a technical incident related to its ground infrastructure," the bloc's space agency said Sunday.

"The incident has led to a temporary interruption of the Galileo initial navigation and timing services," the Prague-based European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency said, adding that Galileo's search and rescue system used to locate distress signals at sea or in mountainous regions was still operational.

Galileo is the world's fourth geo-location satellite system, after ones created by the U.S, Russia and China, and has been pitched by the EU as a more accurate alternative to GPS. The EU has poured some €10 billion into the system, which has operated on a trial basis since late 2016 and is set to be fully operational by the mid-2020s with 30 satellites in orbit.

The current problems with the nascent system were first reported on Thursday, but by Saturday evening, all 22 satellites in orbit were listed as offline. On Sunday, a public notice was posted and GNSS has so far given no timeline for fixing the issue.

Currently, only a limited number of consumer mobile phones are equipped to pick up Galileo's signal. In the meantime, GPS is used to augment Galileo and spot problems with the new system, GNSS said.

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