New York (NY) - XM Radio is experiencing massive outages after one of its satellites was disabled.  The company says satellite number 1 is down for “performance” reasons and the company is currently performing a “software update”.  While the company has a spare satellite, many customers in the United States and Canada are still experiencing problems.

XM subscribers on the xmfan.com website are talking up a storm with an outage message thread that has reached 17 pages as of 2:05 PM PST.  You can read the thread here .

We called up XM technical support and it was apparent that the customer service representative was reading from a script.  He told us that “engineers were aware of this problem” and that they did not have an estimated time of completion.  He added that we should continuously point our antennas towards the southern sky for when the signal did come back.

Interestingly enough, we were able to receive XM Radio just a few minutes ago on an XM-equipped car in Culver City California.  XM Radio operates mainly on satellite, but those signals are also bounced to cars with repeater towers in some urban areas.

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