The Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, located about 12,500 miles above our heads, function as a collective constellation, providing the positioning, navigation, and timing systems that quietly power modern life.
Known as the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), these satellites’ signals form the backbone of mobile networks, energy grids, the internet, and GPS.
Despite their unparalleled contribution to the operation of the 21st-century global economy, their dependability is increasingly under threat. A blackout could cause chaos almost immediately. GPS signals can be jammed, meaning they are deliberately drowned out with other powerful radio signals, and spoofed, where erroneous signals are broadcast to deceive positioning systems.
GPS interference has been documented in Ukraine, the Middle East, and the South China Sea. For example, in battle-ravaged Ukraine, Russians were reportedly jamming GPS and other satellite-based navigation systems around the Baltic Sea in 2024.
The scale of the disruptions was so great that it forced a temporary halt to commercial air traffic at a major airport after flights had to be diverted mid-route.
In Estonia, commercial flight operations at Tartu Airport had to be suspended. According to publicly reported data from commercial aircraft, the jamming also affected parts of neighbouring Latvia and Lithuania, sites in Finland and Sweden across the Baltic Sea, and as far afield as Poland and Germany.
The Russians used a straightforward method, which involved broadcasting a more powerful signal on the same frequency as GPS. Since the real GPS signals come from satellites 12,500 miles above the Earth’s surface, they can easily be drowned out by much closer terrestrial broadcasts. Experts identified three ground-based locations in Russian territory, including the port enclave of Kaliningrad, sandwiched on the Baltic coast between Latvia and Poland, as the sources of the technical interference.
GPS spoofing: A new conflict playbook?
In the Middle East, researchers from the University of Texas in 2024 identified an Israeli air base as a major source of widespread GPS disruptions affecting civilian airline navigation in the region.
These spoofing disruptions involved the transmission of manipulated GPS signals, which can cause aeroplane instruments to misread their location.
Lead researchers Todd Humphreys and Zach Clements stated that they are “highly confident” that Ein Shemer Airfield in northern Israel is the source of these attacks.
The research team utilised data emitted by the spoofer and picked up by satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) to pinpoint its location. They then confirmed their calculations using ground data collected in Israel.
Spoofing, along with GPS jamming, has significantly increased in the past three years, especially near war zones like Ukraine and Gaza, where militaries interfere with navigation signals to redirect aerial attacks.
The Middle East has emerged as a hotspot for GPS spoofing. The New York Times reported that a separate analysis estimated that over 50,000 flights were affected in the region in 2024 alone.
Researchers from SkAI Data Services and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, analysing data from the OpenSky Network, found that these attacks led pilots to mistakenly believe they were over airports in Beirut or Cairo.
Swiss International Air Lines told The New York Times that their flights were spoofed “almost every day over the Middle East.” While these attacks have not led to significant safety risks, as pilots can use alternative navigation methods, they do raise concerns.
Jeremy Bennington, vice president of Spirent Communications, said, “Losing GPS is not going to cause aeroplanes to fall out of the sky. But I also don’t want to deny the fact that we are removing layers of safety.”
Spoofing attacks can trigger false alerts about planes being too close to the ground, leading to navigation confusion and possibly compromising flight safety.
Dana Goward, the founder of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, said, “You would see traffic jams, a lot more traffic accidents, because transportation will experience the first and most immediate impact.”
“An uncertainty wave would affect thousands of aircraft in the air, which rely on GPS and other systems for navigation and precise landing. The precision positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) offered by the US-owned constellation of 31 GPS satellites may then begin to falter in other vital areas of society, such as energy production systems and financial transactions. There would be global repercussions,” says Matt Burgess, a senior journalist who focuses on information security, privacy, and data regulation in Europe.
Fullproof yet vulnerable?
According to Erik Daehler, vice president of defence, satellites, and spacecraft systems at Sierra Space, if a catastrophic event were to occur that results in the complete loss of GPS, every moving object, piece of data, and person would be tracked on a global scale.
He states that if GPS doesn’t work seamlessly or even shuts down in the worst-case scenario, our society and economy will grind to a disastrous halt. The loss of GPS timing signals would be one of the most significant. Cell phone service would likely stop working, and the disruption would swiftly wipe out billions from stock markets.
The United States, which heavily depends on its sovereign space system, has lagged in developing backups that offer the necessary resilience to keep the nation running. This could leave it especially vulnerable to a GPS outage.
In 2024, the National Space-Based PNT Advisory Board issued a warning that Washington had fallen behind. In contrast, China has strengthened its own advanced satellite navigation system, BeiDou, using a vast network of terrestrial radio signals and fibre-optic cables.
Over the course of its 40-year existence, the GPS constellation, which consists of 31 satellites, has undergone multiple hardware upgrades, achieving 100% broadcasting availability and the ability to provide precise location information within seven metres. The four other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) currently in use are Europe’s Galileo constellation, Russia’s GLONASS, and China’s BeiDou.
However, over the last five years, GNSS signals have been targeted more frequently as the technology to interfere with them has become more affordable. The South China Sea, parts of the Middle East, Russia, Israel, Myanmar, and the European Baltic nations have become the most frequently disrupted regions.
“I’m most concerned about aviation. At least one fatal aviation accident in Europe can be traced to GNSS interference as a primary cause. A deliberate attack against US aviation, as opposed to the collateral attacks in Europe, would cause astounding economic harm,” said Todd Humphreys, the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s radio navigation laboratory.
According to aviation officials, the number of spoofing incidents in 2024 was 500% higher than in 2023.
Catching up
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency notes that PNT data is essential to practically all critical infrastructure in the United States, ranging from food production and wastewater management to communications and health care monitoring systems.
However, GPS is frequently the “sole” source of this data, which increases the vulnerability of these systems. In comparison to commercial applications, the military employs a more reliable GPS setup.
Experts suggest that developing a “layered” strategy could help reduce GPS’s susceptibility to attacks. China’s BeiDou and Europe’s Galileo are both newer and, in some ways, more robust than GPS. The National Space-Based PNT Advisory Board highlighted a wider range of backups to BeiDou’s system in a 2024 comparison of BeiDou and GPS.
BeiDou has satellites in multiple orbits and is further along in deploying them into low Earth orbit, while GPS satellites are only found in medium Earth orbit. To broadcast alternatives, China has also installed 20,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cables connecting to 295 timing centres and a terrestrial radio broadcast network known as eLoran.
“In the case of BeiDou, the system’s enhanced resiliency and capability should be considered an element of ‘soft power’ and a tool for great power competition,” the advisory board wrote last year.
Under the direction of former US Coast Guard chief Admiral Thad Allen, the board demanded that GPS be explicitly classified as “critical infrastructure” and that PNT be managed more cooperatively throughout the US government.
There are several ongoing initiatives to improve the GPS setup, as well as different levels of backup systems that have been introduced intermittently across the nation. To ensure they have backups for the timing element supplied by GPS, and that telecom networks maintain some capacity, financial institutions, for example, have been implementing atomic clocks.
According to Jeremy Bennington, vice president of PNT Assurance at Spirent Communications, “That’s not to say that the US doesn’t have a robust timing infrastructure; actually, it’s quite robust.”
He also notes that a large portion of it is dispersed across commercial entities—a significant contrast to China’s national approach.
In 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order to strengthen PNT systems. In 2025, the Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation to find backup GPS options.
The FCC said, “America is exposed to a single point of failure, and our PNT system is open to disruption or manipulation by adversaries when GPS is used as the primary source of PNT data.”
The current GPS can be upgraded in several ways to increase resilience. For a long time, the military has been developing improvements for use in defensive scenarios.
According to Bennington, GPS satellites may be placed in additional orbits, and more powerful signals could be released in the future. Daehler and his team at Sierra Space are developing strategies to mitigate the effects of spoofing and jamming.
In addition, there are hardware updates, some of which have been slow and ongoing for years. Several businesses have recently received funding from the US Space Force to create GPS constellations for low-Earth orbit satellites and system launchers.
Other applications of quantum technologies include the development of new navigational systems. Google’s subsidiary SandboxAQ is developing magnetic navigation. Bennington notes that in addition to improved government oversight of GPS, businesses must invest in modernising their systems and safeguards. It entails spending cash.
“The cost of the airlines’ cancellations and delays, just for a few hours, would be greater than the cost of upgrading their fleets if GPS jamming or spoofing were to occur at any major airport, whether it’s Heathrow, Frankfurt, Munich, or New York,” he added.
While GPS satellites are critical to modern infrastructure, their vulnerability to jamming and spoofing poses significant risks. As global reliance on precise positioning grows, the need for resilient backup systems and improved safeguards has become increasingly urgent.