Excellent descrip of what I saw last night & into this morning, even during the entry R1 Blackout level. I was surfing the 40/30/20m bands & found an eerie & persistent 'quiet earth' that I had never before seen.
Why? During intense solar storms the lower ionosphere becomes extremely electron-dense, and so radio reliant on ionospheric bounce loses energy - becoming degraded or lost altogether - due to increased collisions in this new high-density environment: