Biggest solar flare in years temporarily disrupts radio signals on Earth

I noted 5-10 mins of near total blackout at 0630 Friday morning in the UHF band in New Zealand on the telemetry networks that I manage. Nearly all 200 of our radios reported unusable signal quality and interestingly some radios were down about 20dB+ on rssi as well. Observed it happening in real time, took about 2 minutes to figure out the problem... nothing else can cause that many radios to go down over such a wide area at the same time.

Aurora predictions only go out 3 days at https://auroraforecast.com/ so I suppose that's about how long it takes the charged particles to get to earth. Time frame at the NOAA site are even shorter.

Neither seems to be predicting high probability in the US so I suppose the "Biggest solar flare in years" doesn't necessarily result in a significant increase in the chance of auroras.

I wonder if this is why my cell service stopped working for two hours, yesterday?

And ET couldn't phone home, either.