Galileo is down, God help the EU. The spy “navigation” system is offline, has been, and questions abound. A cyber attack?

Galileo, the EU’s global navigation satellite system, has been down for four days, since July 11, following a mysterious outage. All Galileo satellites are still non-operational, at the time of writing.

According to a service status page, 24 of the 26 Galileo satellites are listed as “not usable,” while the other two are listing a status of “testing,” which also means they’re not ready for real-world usage.

The European GNSS Agency (GSA), the organization in charge of Galileo, has not published any information in regards to the root of the outage, which began four days ago, on Thursday, July 11.

On that day, the GSA published an advisory on its website alerting companies and government agencies employing the Galileo system that satellite signals have degraded and they “may not be available nor meet the minimum performance levels.”

The agency warned that the Galileo system “should be employed at users’ own risk.”

That admonishment sounds par for the standard operating course. Most haven’t heard of this system before, nor do they care now. I first learned of it nearly 20 years ago, at a Federalist Society luncheon in DC. A friend from Germany, a then-JD candidate already possessed of a Ph.D. is computer science something, wouldn’t stop talking about it. We all have our issues. He warned me bluntly that the EU was setting up something far beyond GPS and that they were intent on maintaining secrecy. He said, and I believed him, that his attempts to access information about the then-fledgling project, resulted in his computer being “zapped” repeatedly. They did it to him. Someone has done it to them. And, the world turns…