Galileo outage (2019)
A nearly week-long interruption of the European navigation service, caused not by a satellite but by a ground failure.
A satellite navigation system is more than its satellites: it depends on a ground segment that continuously computes clocks and orbits, then uplinks them for broadcast. If that computation stops, the satellites keep transmitting, but with data that age and become unusable within hours. That is what happened to Galileo when its precise timing facility failed and the backup did not take over. The outage destroyed no asset and harmed no one, because most receivers combine several constellations and fell back on GPS. It illustrates a risk that space insurance, built around the loss of an object in orbit, captures poorly: the unavailability of a service through a single point of failure on the ground, on which thousands of positioning and timing users depend.
From July 11 to July 17, 2019, Galileo's navigation service was unavailable for nearly six days, following a failure of the precise timing facility at the Fucino control center in Italy.
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