PSA: Your wireless isn't broken. Earth has been bombarded with CMEs this week.

In addition to IT & space weather, I'm active in the RC community (flying remote controlled helicopters, "drones" etc.) Most of our controls operate on 2Ghz spectrum and we check this stuff because it interferes so much with flying that it's not worth risking a crash. After receiving dozens of calls, I sent out a little blast email to try and cut down on new tickets. Here's what it said:

Have you been having Wifi problems this week? Earth is getting hit hard with CMEs. Some of the strongest and most consistent that I've seen since I started monitoring Space Weather events. I have had more calls about WiFi outages this week than I have in the last 10 years.

What are CMEs? CME stands for Coronal Mass Ejection, which is gas inside a magnetic field from the sun that's ejected into space. When a CME hits Earth, it creates the beautiful Northern Lights. But it also has wonky effects on all of our electronics, especially devices that use the 2GHz spectrum.

Fortunately, the solution is simple. Just power cycle your devices if you're having problems. Of course you can always give me a call as well!

Sources:

• Information about this week's CME impacts (lots of pretty pictures!)
• Since June 21st, four CMEs have hit Earth and more on the way
• Wikipedia article on Coronal Mass Ejections