The SANS Institute has warned that a significant solar storm (solar mass ejection / eruption), which occurred several times across the entire Earth-facing side of the sun during Sunday (August 1st, 2010), could threaten ISP communication satellites in orbit around the earth.

Four huge coronal mass ejections are now headed towards Earth and one hit earlier this morning. The next three are due at 4pm GMT, midnight tonight and then the final one will hit at 6am GMT on Thursday. We might even be able to see a faint Northern Lights (Aurora) effect in the UK, if not for the terrible weather today and long daylight hours.



Unlike in Roland Emmerich's disaster film 2012, we probably won't need the help of John Cusack to escape our Earths imminent destruction. In fact most communication Satellite's are designed to cope with this kind of event and, with the odd potential exception, most customers of UK broadband Satellite operators are only likely to experience a brief outage, if any. We hope.