SpaceX Starlink Suffers Major Global Outage, Restores Service After 2.5 Hours

SpaceX’s Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet service, experienced one of its largest global outages on Thursday, leaving tens of thousands of users offline. The disruption began around 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT), with outage tracker Downdetector recording over 61,000 reports, primarily from the U.S. and Europe.

Starlink, which serves more than 6 million users across 140 countries, confirmed the outage on X, saying it was working on a fix. Michael Nicolls, Starlink’s vice president of engineering, later announced service restoration after roughly 2.5 hours, citing a failure in “key internal software services” as the cause. Both Nicolls and Musk apologized, pledging to prevent future incidents.

Experts noted the scale of the disruption was unusual for Starlink, known for its resilience and rapid expansion. Doug Madory of Kentik called it “likely the longest outage ever” for the service. Analysts speculated the cause could be a botched software update or a cyberattack, drawing comparisons to last year’s CrowdStrike bug that crippled millions of Windows systems globally.

The outage comes as Starlink upgrades its network to meet rising bandwidth demands and expands partnerships, including a deal with T-Mobile to enable direct-to-cell messaging for emergency communications in remote areas. Since 2020, SpaceX has launched over 8,000 satellites into low-Earth orbit, positioning Starlink as a vital provider for rural consumers, transportation industries, and even military operations through its Starshield unit.

While it remains unclear whether Starshield was affected, the incident highlights growing concerns over the reliability of satellite-based services as they become critical to global communications and defense infrastructure.