On a cold winter night on March 13, 1989, the power grid in Quebec, Canada, went down without a warning, plunging the province into darkness. The underground metro railway in the city of Montreal came to a grinding halt and airport operations were disrupted. Down south in the neighbouring United States, nights lit up in beautiful bright aurorae as far south as Texas, which is not used to seeing such spectacles. Several sensors on the space shuttle Discovery started misbehaving. The broadcast of Radio Free Europe over Russia fell silent, giving rise to fears of jammed communications.
More than three decades later, in the first week of February 2022, almost an entire batch of newly launched SpaceX Starlink communication satellites fell out of their orbit unexpectedly, as if sunk by a storm.
Despite the variety of events across continents, all of them have a common cause: bad space weather.
