The €10billion (£8billion) Galileo project went live in 2016 and is designed to give precision information to all countries within the EU. Organisations, phones and apps across the EU rely on the system but during an upgrade last July, the system went down.
The rebooting of Galileo took six days but according to officials reports, it appears never to have happened.
In Galileo’s quarterly performance report published last week, the system stated it had surpassed all its targets.
The system was shown to be operating optimally across July, August and September and showed no severe drop-off.
The report said: “During this quarterly reporting period, the measured Galileo Initial Open Service performance figures exceed the Minimum Performance Level MPL targets specified in the [OS-SDD], with the exception of the UTC availability MPLs in July.”
Within the report, the drop in the service was downplayed as merely a “technical incident related to its ground infrastructure”.
It added: “On July 10th 2019, Galileo was affected by a technical incident related to its ground infrastructure, which resulted in an interruption of the Galileo initial navigation and timing services.
“The technical issue was solely related to the ground infrastructure in the Galileo control centres, not to the Galileo satellites.
“The incident impacted the time and orbit determination function.
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As it states, “the availability of GGTO Determination metric was 95.68 per cent over the whole quarter”.
Although the problem was assessed by the Independent Inquiry Board, it was not stated what the recommendations are to safeguard from a future drop out in the system.
“The European Commission set up an independent Inquiry Board in September 2019 to analyse the root causes of the incident and provide recommendations.
“The Board was composed of high-level members and experts with proven track records in complex operational projects, in the transport and defence sectors.
“The Board delivered its final recommendations to the European Commission at the beginning of November, to be put into operation at programme and service provision management level.”
The Galileo project also caused a clashed between the UK and EU during Brexit negotiations.
Although, the UK has in the past threatened to create a new satellite system as the clash over the satellite programme continued, within the UK and EU’s negotiations, Britain’s military will reportedly be allowed to use the Public Regulated Service of Galileo.
However, the military will not be able to participate in the development of the system.
Use of the satellite programme will only be allowed if it does not “contravene the essential security interests of the Union and its Member States”.