- Internal software failure caused global Starlink outage
- Outage lasted 2.5 hours, affecting tens of thousands of users
- Speculation on cause includes software update or cyberattack
July 24 (Reuters) – SpaceX’s Starlink suffered one of its biggest international outages on Thursday when an internal software failure knocked tens of thousands of users offline, a rare disruption for Elon Musk‘s powerful satellite internet system.
Users in the U.S. and Europe began experiencing the outage at around 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT), according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage tracker that said as many as 61,000 user reports to the site were made.
Starlink, which has more than 6 million users across roughly 140 countries and territories, later acknowledged the outage on its X account and said “we are actively implementing a solution.”
Starlink service mostly resumed after 2.5 hours, Michael Nicolls, Starlink vice president of Starlink Engineering, wrote on X.
“The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,” Nicolls said, apologizing for the disruption and vowing to find its root cause.
Musk had also apologized: “Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” the SpaceX CEO wrote on X.
The outage was a rare hiccup for SpaceX’s most commercially sensitive business that had experts speculating whether the service, known for its resilience and rapid growth, was beset by a glitch, a botched software update or even a cyberattack.
Doug Madory, an expert at the internet analysis firm Kentik, said the outage was global and that such a sweeping interruption was unusual.
“This is likely the longest outage ever for Starlink, at least while it became a major service provider,” Madory said.
As Starlink gained more users, SpaceX has focused heavily in recent months on updating its network to accommodate demands for higher speed and bandwidth.