Positioning service fails in Poland as GPS jams

Poland has faced a surge of disruptions to GPS and other satellite navigation systems this summer, according to data from a monitoring station run by its National Institute of Telecommunications.

The institute said the source is external and tied to electronic warfare activity in the Baltic Sea region, leaving phones, drones, ships, and aircraft vulnerable to faulty positioning.

The authority recorded prolonged interruptions affecting all global navigation satellite system, or GNSS, frequencies in recent months, the Polish Press Agency first reported.

According to the institute, its monitoring station in Gdansk, Poland recorded significant, hours-long interference affecting all GNSS bands on 70 percent of days in both May and June. During the first 19 days of this month, full-scale outages were recorded on all GNSS bands on roughly two-thirds of days.

Independent measurements echo the findings, with satellite technology sector consultant Blue Dot Solutions reporting extensive disruptions, including nearly 90 hours recorded at stations in Poland's Pomerania region, along the Baltic Sea coast, in July.

Anomalies have been observed regularly since January 2024, with frequency and intensity rising sharply in 2026. Experts warn the interference will persist as long as military jamming continues, and the impact can go far beyond navigation apps, reported Euronews.

Urban mobility systems can display inaccurate locations for city rental bikes, scooters, and vehicles, and recreational and commercial drones can lose reliable positional information.

Shipping and aviation have also been affected, with NATO's Joint Force Command Brunssum reporting on Aug 21 in a social media post that one of its mine counter-measure vessels had experienced GPS jamming during Baltic Sea operations.

Experts from the Gdansk University of Technology, Gdynia Maritime University, and the Institute of Telecommunications have long been pointing to a neighboring country as the primary source of the jamming, which is also known as "spoofing", Poland's Interia online news platform reported.

Lithuania said this year infrastructure used for spoofing had expanded, with the number of antennas increasing from a handful in early 2025 to dozens. The jamming systems can potentially falsify navigation signals over distances of up to 450 kilometers.

Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022, dozens of GPS interference incidents have been recorded in Europe, concentrated in the Baltic, Nordic, and Black Sea regions, Euronews noted.

NATO has said it is intensifying surveillance and rolling out countermeasures, while specialists are calling for more resilient navigation and monitoring systems.