As wars and solar storms expose the fragility of GPS, countries race to build sovereign clocks and layered timing networks

The world discovered an uncomfortable truth this past year: time—at least the precise digital heartbeat that underpins modern life—is more fragile than it looks. From Europe’s skies to American farm fields, a drumbeat of incidents revealed how easily satellite timing can be knocked off balance. Airlines reported waves of spoofing and jamming in conflict‑adjacent airspace. In May 2024, one of the strongest geomagnetic storms in two decades garbled space‑borne signals and sidelined precision‑agriculture guidance at the height of planting season. What had long felt like background infrastructure suddenly moved into the foreground.

Timing is the invisible utility. It is how mobile networks align their towers, how power grids measure and control flows, how data centers coordinate distributed processes, and how banks time‑stamp trades down to microseconds for audit and surveillance. This synchronization layer arrives quietly via global navigation satellite systems (GNSS): the U.S. GPS, Europe’s Galileo, Russia’s GLONASS and China’s BeiDou. Their signals are exquisitely precise—but faint, easily drowned by noise or bent by malice or by space weather. When they falter, systems do not instantly fail; instead they drift, and small errors propagate until they become big problems.

The war‑driven interference problem is no longer hypothetical. Over the past two years, civil aviation authorities and airlines have catalogued hundreds of events in Eastern Europe and the Middle East in which aircraft lost trustworthy satellite navigation or received misleading position and timing. In early September, a jet carrying European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen reportedly experienced GPS disruption while approaching Bulgaria. Officials are still assessing the cause, and some findings have been contested, but the episode captured a wider reality: jamming and spoofing have become common tools in electronic warfare, and civilian systems are often caught in the crossfire.

Nature has been just as unforgiving. During the G5‑level geomagnetic storm of May 10–11, 2024—Earth’s strongest in twenty years—GPS users across the central United States struggled to get a stable fix as ionospheric turbulence distorted satellite signals. Farmers, who rely on centimeter‑level guidance for high‑efficiency planting, reported tractors stopping mid‑field or veering off rows. Satellite broadband providers warned of degraded service. None of this was a cyberattack; it was space weather reminding a terrestrial civilization how much of its timing now arrives from 20,000 kilometers above.

These shocks are accelerating a quiet race to protect time. The thrust is two‑fold: build better clocks and build more ways to move time around. On the clock front, national metrology labs are pushing optical atomic clocks—using lasers and atoms like ytterbium, strontium or aluminum ions—out of the lab and toward field use. In July 2025, U.S. researchers reported a new world‑best accuracy with an aluminum‑ion system. Across Europe and Japan, teams compared ten state‑of‑the‑art optical clocks across six countries using a mix of satellite and fiber links, a rehearsal for the day—likely before decade’s end—when optical transitions redefine the SI second.

Distribution is the other half of resilience: getting verified time to where it’s needed by more than one route. Governments are treating this as infrastructure. The United Kingdom is building a sovereign National Timing Centre, linking clusters of atomic clocks by fiber and radio so that telecoms, broadcasters and grid operators can draw national time without touching space. London is also moving to stand up eLoran—a ground‑based, high‑power, low‑frequency broadcast that is hard to jam and reaches indoors—with an initial focus on protecting national timing services and then extending coverage outward.

Industry is filling gaps of its own. Iridium now offers a Satellite Time and Location service that piggybacks on its low‑Earth‑orbit constellation, delivering stronger, encrypted timing signals that work indoors and can be cross‑checked against GNSS. Start‑ups are building new constellations purpose‑built for resilient PNT (positioning, navigation and timing); Xona Space Systems, for one, launched a production‑class satellite and secured fresh funding this summer. On the ground, data‑center and telecom operators are expanding fiber‑based time distribution, much of it using open technologies such as White Rabbit to push sub‑nanosecond synchronization over ordinary networks.

Aviation is writing its own playbook. European regulators and airline bodies have agreed a joint plan to mitigate GNSS interference: improve reporting and data sharing; harden avionics and update software against spoofing; revise procedures for when instruments disagree; and adapt routes to avoid hot spots identified by real‑time interference maps. As with cybersecurity, the gist is “assume compromise” rather than “assume correctness.” That mindset is spreading to other sectors. Power‑grid operators are revisiting rules for phasor measurement units and protective relays, while financial firms—already bound by microsecond‑level timestamp rules—are validating multiple time sources instead of one.

Behind the scenes, a standards sprint is under way. Metrologists are converging on criteria for when optical clocks are mature enough to redefine the second. Network engineers are documenting high‑accuracy profiles for time transfer over fiber, including mechanisms to detect tampering or misconfiguration. Satellite operators are advancing tougher authentication schemes for GNSS signals. Defence ministries and navies are running sea and air trials of cold‑atom clocks and quantum‑enhanced inertial sensors that can carry precise time and navigation through long outages. The once‑niche discipline of timekeeping is becoming a national capability with strategic consequences.

“Layering” is the watchword. A resilient timing architecture does not pick a single winner; it combines them. GNSS stays in the mix because it is precise and global. Terrestrial broadcasts like eLoran add a powerful second layer that is hard to jam and reaches indoors. Low‑Earth‑orbit timing signals provide urban and indoor coverage with different physics and much higher received power. Fiber networks deliver traceable time directly from national labs, with built‑in monitoring to detect drift, faults or intentional interference. And everywhere, high‑stability local clocks—from ovenized crystals to rubidium standards to compact cold‑atom devices—buy precious hours or days of holdover.

The policy challenge is to make those layers ubiquitous, not boutique. That means investing in a national backbone of clocks and fiber; certifying diverse timing sources for critical sectors; requiring automatic failover and cross‑checks in equipment; and running routine “timing fire drills” the way operators run cyber exercises. It also means transparency: publishing interference maps; turning space‑weather alerts into sector‑specific guidance that matters to farmers and pilots; and reporting how quickly networks detect and resolve timing anomalies. If the electricity grid and the stock market depend on time, regulators will need to treat time as a regulated utility.

There is a cultural shift to navigate as well. For years, engineers could treat time as a free good arriving from the sky. The next phase asks organizations to budget for it, architect for it and measure it continuously. That will feel onerous until the first avoided outage or the first clean audit under stress. After that, resilient time becomes just another reliability metric—tracked, tested and, crucially, boring. That is how you want your time: boring, everywhere and hard to break.

If the past year was the wake‑up call, the next five will be the build‑out. The second itself may be redefined by optical clocks before the decade is out—a scientific milestone with practical benefits, from better geodesy and climate monitoring to more accurate navigation and communications. But the bigger prize is societal: a world where a solar storm or a border skirmish does not knock the heartbeat out of our machines. Protecting time is not about perfect clocks in perfect labs. It is about messy, redundant, well‑engineered systems that keep the world in sync even when the sky goes dark.