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No, the sun didn't knock out your cell service

Cell service might have gone dark for a few hours in Athabasca Sept. 6, but don’t blame the sun. A forecaster with Space Weather Canada said it was “obviously not” the two solar flares that occurred in the morning of Sept.
A look at the magnetic storm forecast last week across Canada.
A look at the magnetic storm forecast last week across Canada.

Cell service might have gone dark for a few hours in Athabasca Sept. 6, but don’t blame the sun.

A forecaster with Space Weather Canada said it was “obviously not” the two solar flares that occurred in the morning of Sept. 6 that caused Athabasca’s cell service outage.

Computational physicist Ljubomir Nikolic said there were two big solar flares Sept. 6, one around 4 a.m. MT and the other around 6 a.m. MT. He said any effects would have occurred almost immediately as the flares were seen, and they would have been short-lived, and would have occurred with communications using higher frequencies than most cell phones.

“Usually, when we have solar flares, we can expect (issues with) communications on the sun side of the earth, but this, no, it was night at the time (in Athabasca),” he said.

He said the solar flares lasted a couple of hours, but also there were no reports of any problems in Canada with communications, especially not cell phone communications.

“Cell phone communications are not at the same signal as the … high frequency communications that people use in the far north to communicate,” Nikolic said. “So there’s a very, very, very, very small possibility that there was a problem [because of] solar flares.”

Athabascans on some networks noted that their service was out Sept. 6 during business hours.

Doug Self, a representative with Telus, said the company had an issue that required a piece of equipment to be reset, so customers may have experienced intermittent access that day.

“We were made aware of the issue at about 10am and our technicians set to work right away to get the equipment running as quickly as possible,” he wrote in an email. “This issue was resolved within the day and full service has since been restored.”

A post that was has made the rounds on social media accounts locally last week claims that “you can blame the sun if your cellphone isn’t working well today.”

Space Weather Canada forecaster Lidia Nikitina said a degrading of the signal could sometimes happen due to the particles that erupt from a solar flare.

“For example, with radar,” Nikolic said. “If they are directly, directly (facing) towards the sun, there can be small interference … Not for long periods of time.”

But Canada? No reported issues, he said.

And Athabasca?

“In this case, really – obviously not,” he added. “Very, very, very low probability.”

The forecasters noted that they were busy monitoring the coronal mass ejections that came after the solar flares caused a huge magnetic storm Sept. 7-8 – which is seen by the average person as the Northern Lights.

Nikolic added that the magnetic storm caused issues with communications Sept. 8, giving the example of airplane communications in low-latitude regions like the Caribbean, as they would be directly exposed to the magnetic radiation.

He added that longer network lines in Canada could also be affected, as magnetic storms can cause issues for long metal lines or fluctuations in power grids. That said, Nikolic role as a space weather forecaster helps companies prepare for these issues.

“We provide the forecast to them, so they know what to expect,” he said.

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