Company says 2.5-hour disruption of high-speed internet service was due to ‘failure’ of internal software services.
SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet has suffered one of its biggest international outages, knocking tens of thousands of users offline, a rare disruption that prompted an apology from senior executives, including founder Elon Musk.
Starlink, which has more than six million users across roughly 140 countries and territories, suffered the disruption on Thursday that lasted for about two hours and 30 minutes, according to Michael Nicolls, Starlink’s vice president of Starlink Engineering, in a post 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.
Users began experiencing the outage at about 3pm on the United States’ East Coast (19:00 GMT) on Thursday, according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage tracker that said as many as 61,000 user reports to the site were made.
