Something is jamming GPS over Europe. Here's what we found

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The Mystery in the Data

In November 2024, Professor Todd Humphreys got a tip that sounded too mundane to matter. Look at two specific days in a publicly available dataset from 2021, collected by GPS monitoring stations across Europe. If something unusual was hiding there, surely someone would have found it by now. But when Humphreys and his student Zach Clements checked those exact timestamps, they saw something no one had noticed before. At one precise moment, receivers across the entire network reported the same thing: a sudden, dramatic drop in signal strength. The navigation signals had been overwhelmed, their signal-to-noise ratio dropping by roughly a factor of 10. When they started digging backward through the data, they found 75 days since 2019 where these strong disruptions had taken place. And every single time, the pattern was identical. All these receivers recorded the same drop at the same time, stretching from Svalbard in the north to Spain in the south, from Canada in the west to eastern Poland in the east. The blast center appeared to be somewhere around Poland or Kaliningrad, a heavily militarized Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea. At first, they thought it might be a side effect of electronic warfare in the region, a ground-based jammer drowning out the satellite signals. But the math didn't work. Even the highest tower in Kaliningrad would only affect aviation as far as Denmark. This wasn't local interference. This was continental scale, and the only way to affect such a wide area simultaneously is from high above the Earth.