logoalt Hacker News

Insimwytimtoday at 7:55 PM3 repliesview on HN

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...


Replies

nomeltoday at 9:12 PM

> 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.

kbeldertoday at 9:29 PM

>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"

Elidrake24today at 8:23 PM

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

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