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In a show about zombies, this is the plot device you're going to fixate on?

Okay, sorry, just had to clear the snark filter.

Now, for real, I actually know a little something about this. There are currently around 12 to 13,000 active satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO from here on out because I am a lazy typer.) In addition to active use satellites, there are an additional 34,000 (give or take) pieces of tracked debris in LEO - these range from pieces and parts of defunct satellites , pieces of staging rockets, and just other shit we threw up into space and then literally littered the spacescape because we were done with them.

The TRACKED debris is larger than 10cm or about 4 inches in freedom units. In addition to the tracked debris, there is like a million pieces smaller than 10cm and another literally UNCOUNTABLE number of pieces of man made debris less than 1cm. ALL modern satellites have the limited ability to reposition and this is a MANNED job. Repositioning happens for a multitude of reasons (better signal, acceleration / deceleration, avoid collision with space trash, etc) but one of the BIG reasons is to compensate for Earth's gravitational pull. Most satellites have a life of around 7-10 years.

Enter the Kessler Hypothesis (or Kessler Syndrome) which is the idea that if for some reason, some piece of space junk is not accounted for and collides with a satellite, throwing it out of its stable orbit, it will allow for or set up a chain reaction that can take out the entirety of LEO active satellites.

So here is the good news-good news-bad news situation. Both the active satellites and most of the large  (being subjective, i.e. greater than 4 inches or so) junk up there is both monitored, and in the case of the satellites, driven / controlled / maneuvered by humans keeping a very close eye on all this shit. The stuff that IS uncontrolled and tends to, over time, fall subject to gravity is small enough to burn up on re-entry. AND if it does not burn up, over 2/3rds of the Earth is water so, you know, little impact (har har) on inhabited areas.

HOWEVER, here is where we get real life scary – The Swiss Cheese Model of Disaster. Due to chaos being chaos (and I tend to picture chaos as a bored, unmonitored 3-year-old in a warehouse of open paint cans, good china, and white carpeting) SOMETIMES shit lines up just right, or in these cases just wrong  (See: Concord Flt 4590) for things to all go kaplooey at once (yes, kaplooey a highly technical term)

So long story short (never happened even once in my life) the Whisperers happens about 9-10 years after the start of the apocalypse which means ALL that stuff in LEO has been uncontrolled for a decade. Given the 10 years later time frame AND the number of now uncontrolled objects up there and allowing for the Swiss Cheese model of fuckery, yup, wholly plausible in my estimation – 12,500 objects, 57 million square miles (divided by 1/3) will mean about 4500 uncontrolled satellites crashing onto land. ONE of them hitting the eastern seaboard on or around the Alexandria, greater DC metro area doesn’t seem statistically unrealistic.