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A follow-up to this news report:
Two outbursts from the sun caused widespread cellphone outages throughout the United States on Thursday (Feb. 22).
Two powerful solar flares erupted from the sun on the evening of Wednesday (Feb. 21) and during the early morning of Thursday (Feb. 22). An X1.8-class flare occurred at 6:07 p.m. ET (2307 GMT) on Feb. 21, and another, an X1.7 class flare, erupted at 1:32 a.m. ET (0632 GMT) on Feb. 22. The flares erupted from a region of the sun that "continues to exhibit strong magnetic complexity," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wrote in a statement about the events.
"No apparent CMEs resulting from these events have been observed as of the time of this writing, but can not be ruled out," the agency added. Nevertheless, NOAA issued an alert today for a solar radio emission at 6:58 a.m. ET (1158 GMT), which are sometimes joined by strong coronal mass ejections (CME) and solar radiation storms.
EDIT: Apparently, the article was updated after I posted this, around noon. It now looks like there isn't a correlation between the two solar flares and the abrupt outages of the cellular networks.
News - AT&T, other cell service providers having outages, customers report
Customers of numerous U.S. cell service providers were reporting outages early Thursday morning, according to the website Downdetector.com, which tracks such reports. AT&T had by far the most, with tens of thousands of customers telling Downdetector they had no service. Customers of T Mobile...
www.thehelper.net
Two outbursts from the sun caused widespread cellphone outages throughout the United States on Thursday (Feb. 22).
Two powerful solar flares erupted from the sun on the evening of Wednesday (Feb. 21) and during the early morning of Thursday (Feb. 22). An X1.8-class flare occurred at 6:07 p.m. ET (2307 GMT) on Feb. 21, and another, an X1.7 class flare, erupted at 1:32 a.m. ET (0632 GMT) on Feb. 22. The flares erupted from a region of the sun that "continues to exhibit strong magnetic complexity," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wrote in a statement about the events.
"No apparent CMEs resulting from these events have been observed as of the time of this writing, but can not be ruled out," the agency added. Nevertheless, NOAA issued an alert today for a solar radio emission at 6:58 a.m. ET (1158 GMT), which are sometimes joined by strong coronal mass ejections (CME) and solar radiation storms.
Powerful twin solar flares erupt from sun as cell phone outages spike across US (video)
It remains unclear if there is a connection between the two events.
www.space.com
EDIT: Apparently, the article was updated after I posted this, around noon. It now looks like there isn't a correlation between the two solar flares and the abrupt outages of the cellular networks.
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