Starlink Acknowledges Software Failure Behind Outage of Satellite Internet Service
By Corinne Reichert
Outage reports spiked Thursday afternoon for Elon Musk’s high-flying satellite operations.
Starlink experienced an outage Thursday afternoon that went on for 2.5 hours and took down tens of thousands of people’s satellite internet service.
By a little after 5 p.m. PT Thursday, the company said in a post on X that the underlying network issue had been resolved and Starlink service was restored.
The company provided only cursory information about what happened behind the scenes. “The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,” Starlink VP of engineering Michael Nicolls said on X.
Starlink, owned by Elon Musk, has changed the game in terms of internet accessibility in rural and other underserved areas lacking high-speed broadband infrastructure. It has 2 million US subscribers, and more than 6 million globally.
Outage reports spiked to around 60,000 at about 1 p.m. PT, according to the Downdetector service, which tracks submissions from users about site problems. At the same time, Starlink took to social media to acknowledge the issue: “Starlink is currently in a network outage and we are actively implementing a solution. We appreciate your patience, we’ll share an update once this issue is resolved,” it posted on X at 1:05 p.m. PT.
On Downdetector, outage reports dropped to just 1,600 as of 4:30 p.m. PT. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)
