Starlink restores service after two-hour global outage
SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service, which faced a major outage on Thursday affecting users worldwide for over two hours, has now been restored.Reports of service issues started to appear around 3:20 p.m. ET, according to the outage tracking website DownDetector. SpaceX acknowledged the problem at 4:05 p.m. through a message on Starlink’s official X (formerly Twitter) account, confirming the network outage and stating that they were working on restoring the service.
Partial service began to return around 5:30 p.m. ET, and Starlink's Vice President of Engineering, Michael Nicolls, announced at 6:23 p.m. that the network had “mostly recovered.”
Users from the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, and various parts of Asia reported being impacted. Conversations on the Starlink subreddit, r/Starlink, highlighted the global extent of the outage. While SpaceX has not revealed the exact number of affected users, the platform currently caters to over six million customers worldwide.
Starlink’s website also acknowledged the outage, but the company’s initial communications did not clarify the cause. In a subsequent update, Nicolls attributed the outage to a “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,” confirming there were no issues with the satellite hardware or the constellation itself. He guaranteed users that a comprehensive investigation would be carried out to avoid future occurrences.
Starlink is promoted as a high-speed internet solution for remote or underserved regions where conventional broadband services are lacking. It is frequently utilized by rural inhabitants, digital nomads, and more recently, through a partnership with T-Mobile, to extend smartphone connectivity beyond typical cellular coverage. It is still uncertain whether the T-Mobile-linked services experienced any impact from Thursday’s disruption.
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