A firmware update is coming this week

GoPro has figured out why Karma drones worldwide have been unable to fly since the beginning of the new year, as TAHAV first reported on Sunday, and says a fix is coming.

The company says its engineering team is “testing a resolution” and that a firmware update will be released “within the week” that will make it possible for Karma drones to fly again. That firmware update will be posted here when it’s ready.

In the first few days of 2020 Karma users around the world started realizing they were having trouble getting their drones to take flight. They soon posted to official GoPro forums and on Twitter that their controllers were receiving compass and GPS errors. It initially seemed like Karma may have been affected by the recent GPS and GLONASS clock rollovers, but the company wrote in a blog post late Monday that the drones had actually “experienced an issue” connecting to the World Magnetic Model. GoPro says its drones rely on this model to improve positioning accuracy, and that the issue was triggered on January 1st. The company did not offer any more detail on what went wrong.

GoPro discontinued Karma in January 2018 and exited the drone business following a number of stumbles with the product, including a recall just weeks after its initial launch. The company promised it would continue to support the drone after its discontinuation, though it never said for how long. The last firmware update GoPro released for the drone was in September 2018.

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