The Impact of the GPS UTC Anomaly Event of 26 January 2016 on the Global Timing Community

摘要

On 26th January 2016 alarms started to occur on GPS timing receivers around the globe. These kicked off at 2am in the morning in the UK. What had happened, what was going wrong? This presentation will tell the story as experienced by the Chronos support team, who over a 4 day period dealt with nearly 5000 alarm events from many different GPS timing receivers installed around the world. It will examine whether the alarms were service affecting or was the equipment switching to a resilient fall-back status. This event was not without precedent. The last time such an event happened to the GPS transmission was 1st January 2004 and coincidentally SVN23 was to blame then. A major network event happened to Glonass on April 1st 2014. These qualify as "Black Swan Events" first proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2001 book, "Fooled by Randomness". This was a unique event with unique impact across the globe. Chronos supports many 1000s of GPS based timing receivers for over 100 clients in over 50 countries. With this view of GPS based timing around the globe, Chronos was in a position to watch the vent unfold. This paper not only tells the story of the evolution of the event, but also reviews more recent work to understand what caused the event and how it manifested itself.