Jamming makes satellite navigation difficult or unavailable. Spoofing can make it look available while feeding a receiver a false position or time. For a civilian aircraft or ship, the second problem can be especially misleading: a confident-looking location on a screen is not necessarily a reliable one.

Both affect global navigation satellite systems, or GNSS. GPS is the US system within that wider family, alongside Europe's Galileo and other constellations. Calling every incident a GPS outage obscures two separate questions: which navigation information was affected, and whether the receiver lost a signal or accepted misleading information.

Losing the signal and accepting a false one

Jamming interferes with reception of legitimate satellite signals. Spoofing supplies misleading signals that a receiver may interpret as genuine navigation information. An incident can involve more than one effect, and a report of navigation trouble does not by itself identify the mechanism. The terms describe what interference does; they do not name the perpetrator.

The distinction extends beyond the moving dot on a map. Satellite systems provide positioning, navigation and timing, commonly shortened to PNT. Equipment that depends on their timing or position input can inherit a problem even if its screen still works. Different displays may also depend on the same underlying input, so apparent agreement between them is not necessarily independent confirmation.

That is why the UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency's MGN 719 guidance, published online on 1 October 2026, addresses wider dependencies. It identifies navigation equipment, vessel traffic services, port operations and timing-dependent systems as potentially affected. The document describes risks and preparedness; it does not establish the cause of any particular accident.

Civilian effects reach beyond a conflict zone

On 25 March 2025, the International Civil Aviation Organization, International Maritime Organization and International Telecommunication Union jointly warned about interference affecting aviation, maritime and telecommunications services. Their recommendations included preserving conventional navigation infrastructure, improving incident reporting and coordinating civilian and military authorities. The warning concerned civilian safety, including humanitarian operations.

The practical concern is dependence. An aircraft may receive misleading navigation information; a ship's position information may become unreliable; shore services may receive data affected by the same disruption. The consequences depend on the equipment, other available information and the crew's response. An interference report is not equivalent to a crash, collision or loss of control.

Nor does a false track prove that a vehicle physically followed it. Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B, transmits aircraft information that can include a position derived from onboard navigation. A display can therefore show an erroneous reported position. Interpreting the picture requires understanding where the data came from, just as interpreting combat footage requires separating visible evidence from its caption.

What the published numbers actually count

The International Air Transport Association's 2024 safety-report release, issued on 26 February 2025, used its Incident Data Exchange to describe a 175 percent rise in GNSS interference rates between 2023 and 2024 and a 500 percent rise in GPS spoofing incidents. These are findings from IATA's reporting dataset, not a census of every interference event worldwide.

The percentages also do not say that 175 percent of flights were affected. A rise compares a later rate with an earlier rate; it is different from the share of all flights experiencing a problem. Reporting coverage and definitions matter when comparing this dataset with a map, another operator's reports or a count covering a different period.

A separate example appears in ICAO working paper A42-WP/553, dated 10 September 2025. Appendix A reproduces evidence submitted by Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden. It describes 293 spoofed flights from November 2024 to February 2025, with more than 21,000 ADS-B measurements showing false positions around Rostov. Those measurements are not 21,000 separate flights.

The same paper records the ICAO Council's finding concerning interference originating in Russian territory and its decision to report an infraction of the Chicago Convention to the Assembly. That is an identified institutional finding supported by submitted measurements, not an attribution inferred here from a striking flight-tracking image. The dated finding should not be extended automatically to every later anomaly elsewhere.

Detection, attribution and resilience

Detection asks whether navigation information was disrupted or misleading. Attribution asks where the interference came from and who was responsible. A public map can help show a pattern without resolving either question completely. A strange aircraft track, a ship's Automatic Identification System anomaly or an operational warning needs context before it becomes evidence against a particular actor.

This distinction does not require ignoring well-supported attribution. It requires naming the body making the finding, the evidence it describes, the affected geography and the relevant dates. It also prevents a general warning about electronic warfare from becoming an unsupported claim about an individual vessel or flight.

For civilian operators, the policy response centers on dependable alternatives and practiced procedures. The maritime guidance calls for independent checks where practicable and continued competence in alternatives such as radar, visual navigation, celestial navigation and dead reckoning. Those methods have their own limits; merely listing a backup does not establish that every vessel has it or that its crew can use it effectively.

The wider lesson is about information quality. Multiple systems are useful only if their dependencies and failure modes are understood. As with layered air defense, a collection of equipment is not the same thing as a functioning system. Readers assessing the next interference report should look for the affected service, the observation period, the evidence for the claimed mechanism and the separate evidence, if any, identifying a source.