Elon Musk ‘sorry’ after Starlink satellite internet suffers global outage

Tens of thousands of users were taken offline by SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet, which was one of its biggest international outages, which led to an apology from senior executives, including founder Elon Musk.

According to Michael Nicolls, Starlink’s vice president of Starlink Engineering, the disruption on Thursday lasted for about two hours and 30 minutes, according to a post on X.

Experts speculated whether the service, known for its resilience and rapid growth, was affected by a glitch, a hacked software update, or even a cyberattack because it was a rare hiccup for SpaceX’s most commercially sensitive business.

According to Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage tracker that reported up to 61, 000 user reports to the website, users started experiencing the outage on Thursday around 3 p.m. on the United States’ East Coast (19:00 GMT).

According to Nicolls, “the outage was caused by the core network’s key internal software services” ().

We regret the temporary downtime that our service experienced. We are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and we will fully resolve this problem and prevent it from happening again,” he said.

Musk also expressed regret for the interruption. The CEO and founder of SpaceX, who also owns X, stated that SpaceX would address the root cause to prevent it from occurring again.

Since 2020, SpaceX has launched more than 8, 000 Starlink satellites, creating a highly competitive network in low-Earth orbit that has attracted significant demand from militaries, transportation companies, and rural residents who have little access to traditional, fibre-optic internet.