On Sunday, 27 August 2000 at 1545 UTC, Satmex control centres received a series of alarms indicating the turn-off of the remaining backup SCP. After 65 attempts to re-establish contact with the backup SCP, Satmex switched off its satellite and declared it a total loss.
Satmex said in a statement shortly after the SCP failure, "Command and telemetry capability on Solidaridad 1 was partially re-established almost immediately. Notwithstanding, the processor has not responded to commands sent by the control centres. At this time the transponder payload has been turned off and is not operating."
Satmex added, "The engineers at the control centres are working on the diagnosis of the anomaly. At this moment, Satmex has no further information regarding the most probable cause of the turn-off of the control processor on Solidaridad 1."
A few days later, "Technicians from the makers [Hughes] recommended the satellite's operations should be terminated based on the loss of electric energy stored in the batteries at reaching their minimal acceptable level," according to Jorge Nicolin, president of the Mexican Federal Telecommunications Commission (Cofetel.) The satellite had lost power because its solar arrays were no longer properly aligned with the sun.
The primary SCP failed in 1999.
On 28 April 1999, around 1900 UTC, Solidaridad 1 developed a malfunction, which caused the satellite to spin. According to reports, transponders stopped broadcasting one by one until around 2110 UTC no programming could be received. Most services were moved temporarily to backup capacity on Satmex 5. At around 1100 UTC on 29 April 1999, all services were restored--according to the official yet inaccurate version spread at that time. However, during testing on 1 May 1999 another outage occured which interrupted services for seven hours.
While the first incident (28 April 1999) can easily explained with the failure of one satellite control processor (SCP1,) the second one is a bit more complicated. According to Satelites Mexicanos (SatMex,) "The problem Solidaridad 1 had with its SCP2 was a result of non updated data the system was working with, due to an automatic reconfiguration during the SCP1's failure. The problem was identified and solved before any further procedures were undertaken."