The BBC News article Aurora photographers find new night sky lights and call them Steve says:
A group of aurora enthusiasts have found a new type of light in the night sky and named it Steve.
Eric Donovan from the University of Calgary in Canada spotted the feature in photos shared on a Facebook group.
He did not recognise it as a catalogued phenomenon and although the group were calling it a proton arc, he knew proton auroras were not visible. Testing showed it appeared to be a hot stream of fast-flowing gas in the higher reaches of the atmosphere.
The European Space Agency (ESA) sent electric field instruments to measure it 300km (190 miles) above the surface of the Earth and found the temperature of the air was 3,000C (5,432F) hotter inside the gas stream than outside it.
Inside, the 25km-wide ribbon of gas was flowing at 6 km/s (13,000mph), 600 times faster than the air on either side.
Relatively little else is known about the big purple light as yet but it appears it is not an aurora as it does not stem from the interaction of solar particles with the Earth's magnetic field. (emphasis added)
I'm wondering, what is Steve and why wasn't Steve characterize earlier?
But more importantly: Could this 6 km/s flow of glowing gas and plasma have affected the ISS when it was orbiting closer to 300 km, or other low-orbiting spacecraft? According to the article, this is not an aurora, or a 'proton arc'. This seems to be something very different, and the complete phenomenon may not be necessarily limited to an altitude of 300 km.
I'm not thinking that the ISS would be "blown off course", but a sudden transient charging event may be difficult to effectively neutralize, just as an example.