For several hours starting at 2100 GMT on 1 April 2014, the entire Russian Glonass satellite navigation system (Russia’s equivalent to GPS) failed. Media sources initially reported that the fault lay with ground controllers who apparently uplinked faulty ephemeris data to each of the Glonass system’s satellites in Medium Earth Orbit. The fault was later blamed by Roscosmos on mathematical errors in the software. The ephemeris data is needed by the spacecraft for it to know its orbital location. It is that data which is transmitted to user receivers that allows users to determine their location on Earth. A correction was made and the system was recovered at 0800 GMT on 2 April 2014. As GPS is officially a military system owned and run by the US Air Force, though with increasing civil applications, so the Russian government now allows civilian users to use its military Glonass system.
Glonass navigation system is shut down for a while after control room/software error
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