Flightradar - what's going on?

[KenAdams]

All these Russian planes have declared emergencies all at the same time!

Has no one seen the "drone" flying around at Mach 18 at 80,000 Ft yet?
Sometimes pops up, getting conspiracy lovers talking.

Its often spoofed, FKPUTIN is still my fav from the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

@Thatladdo

Has no one seen the "drone" flying around at Mach 18 at 80,000 Ft yet?
Sometimes pops up, getting conspiracy lovers talking.

Now you've blown it, that's one of the new chemtrail laying drones that nobody is supposed to know about...can cover a single continent in about three hours....oh..oopps...

I'll give it a go, first a bit of background:

Most commercial aircraft fly around continuously transmitting data (e.g. position, probably from GPS, altitude, speed, transponder code and other info)...

Flight radar gets a lot of it's data from amateurs who have radio receivers that basically eavesdrop on the data that iss actually intended for ATC and pass it to the Flight radar server. They then use the data to build the picture you see on the website.

As for this morning's event I'd speculate one possibility is somebody somewhere simply sent the Flightradar servers a batch of fictitious ("spoof" ) data that drew lots of nice aircraft in various positions, all squawking 7700 (the emergency code).

Not wishing to disparage Flightradar but it's always worth remembering that whilst it is useful it started as and is still largely a hobbists' site and treat the info with caution...

There are often inaccuracies in some of the data displayed due to technical limitations and since it's being fed from multiple sources via the internet it's vulnerable to being corrupted in ways that shouldn't happen to the feed that real world ATC get.

I had no idea, thank you