SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service experienced one of its most significant global outage on Thursday, after an internal software failure knocked tens of thousands of users offline for several hours.
According to outage tracking site Down-detector, users in the United States and Europe began reporting connectivity issues around 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT). The site received more than 61,000 reports at the height of the incident.
Starlink, which serves over 6 million users across around 140 countries and territories, later confirmed the disruption via its official X (formerly Twitter) account, stating: “We are actively implementing a solution.”
Service was mostly restored after about two and a half hours, according to Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink Engineering.
“The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,” Nicolls wrote on X.
He apologized for the interruption and added that the company is working to identify the root cause.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also addressed the incident, writing, “Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
The scale and duration of the outage raised questions among experts about what might have triggered such a rare failure in Starlink’s usually robust infrastructure.
Doug Madory, an expert at internet analysis firm Kentik, described the disruption as global and noted that “such a sweeping interruption was unusual.”
“This is likely the longest outage ever for Starlink, at least while it became a major service provider,” he said.
As demand for faster and broader internet access continues to grow, SpaceX has been upgrading Starlink’s infrastructure to support higher speeds and increased bandwidth.
The company is also expanding the service’s capabilities through a partnership with T-Mobile, aiming to offer direct-to-cell text messaging via more powerful satellites — a feature designed to enable emergency communications in remote areas.
Since launching the project in 2020, SpaceX has deployed over 8,000 Starlink satellites, creating a low-Earth orbit network that has drawn interest from military, transportation, and rural internet users worldwide.
