According to NOAA Space Weather, two strong solar flares occurred yesterday evening and early this morning. As defined by the NOAA Space Weather, a solar flare is an eruption of energy from the Sun that generally lasts minutes up to hours long.

The latest flare peaked around 12:30 AM CST on Thursday, February 22, 2024, and was rated at X1.7 flare. The first solar flare peaked around 5 PM CST on Wednesday, February 21, 2024, and was rated an X1.8 flare. Flares are classified by their strength on a letter class scale: B, C, M, and X, where B is the weakest flare, and X is the strongest. Within each letter class, there is a finer scale that goes from 1 to 9.

According to a discussion released by the Space Weather Prediction Center around 6:30 AM CST, most of the energy from these flares missed Earth's orbit. Still, there is a chance we could get a "glancing influence" around the 25th of February by this energy.

There is some online speculation that ongoing outages with AT&T, along with Verizon and T-Mobile, could be linked to these solar flares. T-Mobile and Verizon are reporting they are not seeing outages at this time. These outages are likely not due to the flares, as the energy from the sun impacts HF communications, not UHF, which is where we find communications from cell phone providers. Additionally, impacts from solar flares come from solar and geomagnetic storms, neither of which are forecast to occur.