Tens of thousands knocked offline after software failure at Musk’s Starlink

SpaceX’s powerful internet system suffers rare disruption in one of its biggest international outages

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 US and Europe began experiencing the outage at around 3pm EDT (1900 GMT), according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage tracker that said as many as 61,000 user reports to the site had been 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.