Researchers report on a solar storm that caused a GPS glitch serious enough to crash self-driving cars
You may not think about it, but Earth is under a constant bombardment of solar radiation shooting through space. While our planet's magnetic field does an excellent job of blocking it, sometimes concentrated bursts of radiation known as solar flares are strong enough to interfere with our ground infrastructure via secondary magnetic field ripples.
Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers from the US have documented the damage done by a solar 'superstorm' that erupted from the Sun on November 11, 2025. It hit the maximum level on the scale used to measure these storms, causing an unprecedented level of disruption in Earth's upper atmosphere (the ionosphere).
The storm's effects were also unusually widespread, the researchers report, stretching coast to coast across the US for hours. It threw GPS positioning systems off by as much as 10 meters (33 feet) in some areas, and interrupted satellite communications.
Given that GPS errors...
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