Intelsat has announced a service outage on the Intelsat 33e satellite, affecting users in Europe, Africa and parts of the Asia-Pacific region.
The satellite operator says that it is working closely with manufacturer Boeing to address the situation, but based on the information available the company believes that it is unlikely that the satellite will be recoverable.
“While we assess our fleet’s capacity as well as working with third party providers to mitigate service interruptions, Intelsat representatives are in direct communication with all affected customers,” the company said, in a statement.
Intelsat 33e was designed and manufactured by Boeing Space Systems and was launched in August 2016, before entering service in January 2017 located at 60 degrees East. The satellite was designed to have a 15-year lifespan, though a propulsion issue detected during in-orbit testing had reduced that expected figure by approximately 3.5 years.
The Intelsat 33e satellite was the second in Intelsat’s EpicNG high-throughput satellite series, with its predecessor, Intelsat 29e, having also been lost in 2019 following a malfunction after just three years in geostationary orbit.
