Built by Lockheed Martin, AMC-14 was owned by SES Americom , part of Paris, France- based SES, and planned for use by Echostar Inc. for improving communications services over parts of North and South America.

The failure to place the AMC-14 satellite into orbit was attributed to an anomaly during the second burn of the Breeze M upper stage. Inmarsat (London, England) immediately suspended plans to ship the third Inmarsat-4 satellite to its launch site and expects the scheduled late-April launch to be postponed pending an investigation into the failed launch of the Russian rocket.

This was thesecond ILS Proton launch failure caused by a malfunction of the Breeze M. The AMC-14 launch from Baikonur was the 45th Proton mission for ILS, and the fifth failure since it began commercial launches of the Russian booster in April 1996.

"While we are not in a position to comment on the possible causes of this launch anomaly, the satellite is healthy and is operating nominally in a stable orbit under the control of Lockheed Martin. SES and Lockheed Martin engineers are currently exploring various options for bringing AMC-14 into its proper geostationary orbit," said Martin Halliwell, President of SES Engineering.

Edward Horowitz, President and CEO of SES Americom, added the satellite network operator is "confident" the engineering teams at Lockheed Martin and SES will find a way to place AMC-14 into the correct orbit.