Several companies were hit by hours of system warnings after 15 GPS satellites broadcast the wrong time, according to time-monitoring company Chronos.
The company observed problems last week, after noticing some GPS time signals were 13 microseconds out.
Such a discrepancy is considered severe and several Chronos telecoms clients faced "12 hours" of system errors.
According to the US Air Force (USAF), which manages the GPS satellite network, problems began when a satellite named SVN 23 was decommissioned.
A USAF spokeswoman confirmed that the error had been pushed to the satellites by "ground system software".
According to specialist from Chronos company:
"What we saw was about 12 hours of problems," he told the BBC.
Prof Curry said telecoms companies relied on the accuracy of time measurements to control the flow of data through their networks.
The bits and bytes of a telephone call, for example, might be synchronised based on the time as reported by GPS satellite signals.
That signal was constantly monitored for accuracy.
And when the 13 microsecond error had been detected, it resulted in thousands of system warnings being activated at some companies.
"The alarms were escalating,"
"One particular network we have, which is a global network, [was] seeing alarms from all over the place, all over the world."
Imagine, a 13 microsecond discrepancy (which is 0,000013 seconds) cause global unrest for 12 hours, what will happen if GPS satellites go down, for several hours or days or weeks as a result of a solar flare?
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