Overview
- Roughly half the vessels in the Gulf region—about 1,000 ships—have intermittently or continuously lost location fixes, with most cases off the UAE and Oman, according to Kpler’s Dimitris Ampatzidis.
- Experts tie the outages to conflict-related radio jamming and spoofing, with Gulf states using defensive jamming to counter drone threats, echoing prior practices reported in Israel and Iran.
- Many commercial receivers track only the legacy GPS L1 C/A signal and cannot fall back to Galileo or BeiDou, making them easier to disrupt than modern multi-band, multi-constellation devices.
- Jamming can overwhelm signals with a stronger transmission, while spoofing can falsify Automatic Identification System data, producing erroneous or nonsensical ship positions.
- Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has sharply declined, with only nine tankers, cargo and container ships reported transiting since last Sunday after attacks on three vessels in the area.