SPACEX’S Starlink suffered one of its biggest international outag-es 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 US 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 ex-perts speculating whether the service, known for its resilience and rapid growth, was beset by a glitch, a botched software update or even a cyberattack.
The company, in a partnership with T-Mobile, is expanding the constellation with larger, more
powerful satellites to offer direct-to-cell text messaging services, a line of business in which mobile phone users can send emergency text messages through the net-work in rural areas.
SpaceX has launched more than 8,000 Starlink satellites 2020, building a uniquely distributed network in low-Earth orbit that has attracted intense demand from militaries, transportation industries and consumers in rural areas with poor access to traditional, fiber-based internet.
REUTERS
