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The title misrepresents things (people are posting this everywhere with this wrong title). The satellites were not lost to the geomagnetic storm. They were lost to the atmosphere expanding from the geomagnetic storm. The title implies some kind of electronic damage from the geomagnetic storm when in fact there has been none.

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When my garage flooded during a storm, can I blame the storm?

Sure. The issue is that there is a way of interpreting this headline that the satellites can be easily damaged by electromagnetic storms. But actually these satellites were only vulnerable because they had not achieved their normal orbit and the thing that affected them was the atmosphere, not the radiation. People could assume the whole constellation could be easily damaged, but that is not implied by this scenario.

> When my garage flooded during a storm, can I blame the storm?

Not a very good analogy. It's more like trying lay the blame for killing a piece of electronics on lightning that hit a mile from your house when in fact it was flooded by the rain.

Not really, the lightning didn't cause the flood, whereas the storm did cause the atmosphere expansion

Your complaint would be as if someone didn’t know that “thunderstorms” caused rain in addition to lightning and thought someone was claiming lightning flooded their garage.

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