Elon Musk’s Starlink went down on Thursday afternoon, causing chaos across the globe. Reports that Starlink was down started flooding in on Down Detector at about 15:00 EST, numbering about 55,000 reports.
Of the reported issues with Starlink, 68% said there was a “total blackout.”
Starlink’s official account posted on X, formerly Twitter, to acknowledge the outage and reassure users it was working on a solution.
Elon Musk apologised for the outage of his Starlink network, on X. “SpaceX will remedy the root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” he wrote.
Satellite internet constellation Starlink provides network coverage for around 130 countries and territories, with the aim of offering global mobile broadband. Part of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the company is growing quickly. Over the past year, Starlink expanded to 42 new countries, territories and other markets around the world, according to a recent press release.
How Long Was Starlink Down And Is It Back Up Yet?
The outage lasted around two hours. Now, Starlink seems to be mostly back up and running, but there are still reports of issues at the time of writing.
“Still down here in the Philippines north Cotabato,” one user wrote on Down Detector.
“East Texas still down,” another user added.
However, users in Nesbit Mississippi and central California said they could now access Starlink services.
“Starlink has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours,” Michael Nicolls, VP of Starlink engineering at SpaceX wrote on X.
What Caused The Starlink Outage?
Nicolls says the outage was due to “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.”
“We apologize for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again, Nicolls wrote.
I have contacted Starlink owner SpaceX for a comment and will update this article if the firm responds.
It sounds like the outage was caused by a technical issue, but what specifically that means is difficult to say without more information. However, Starlink users aren’t used to seeing outages of this size and the tens of thousands or more people who were affected will not be impressed by the service going down.