The Anik F2 satellite which went offline yesterday due to a software malfunction is back in service said Telesat, its owner. While the satellite was down it affected mostly northern communities in Canada’s arctic. Services affected included phone and banking services which were offline and caused First Air to cancel most flights.
The cause of the problem was a software update that did not work as expected. This forced the satellite to go into safe mode and point towards the sun to make sure it had enough power to keep functioning.
Telesat was able to remove the affected software update and restore service.
The outage does bring to light to the vulnerabilities of northern communities should the satellite go offline and again and demonstrates how dependant we are on satellites.