Starlink Satellite Internet Back Online After Worldwide Outage

What Happened?

Starlink satellite internet suffered an hours long worldwide outage before service was eventually restored. The outage began at 3:15 PM eastern standard time, with users receiving error messages saying there is ‘no healthy upstream.’

Starlink then posted a message on X at 4:05PM ET: ‘Starlink is currently in a network outage and we are actively implementing a solution. We appreciate your patience, we’ll share an update once this issue is resolved.’

The service was back online after a nearly three-hour outage. According to Starlink engineering VP Michael Nicolls, ‘The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.’

Why it Matters

The outage was the longest Starlink has ever experienced since becoming a major service provider. The outage got the attention of Elon Musk, who apologized for the disruption and then posted on X. ‘SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again,’ he tweeted. 

According to Starlink’s website, over the past year Starlink has expanded to 42 new countries, territories and other markets around the world while growing by 2.7 million active customers globally and serving more than 6 million users with high-speed, low-latency internet. 

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Latency refers to the delay in time from transmission to reception of signals that travel great distances. For satellites in earth orbit, even signals travelling at the speed of light require a fraction of a second to complete the trip, and that brief lag is known as latency.

Thursday’s outage not only affected civilian Starlink subscribers but even Ukraine’s military. The Kyiv Independent reported that the outage affected Ukrainian troops who rely on Starlink terminals, citing a Telegram message from the Ukrainian military which said that Starlink was down across the entire front. 

Satellite based internet service is attractive because it doesn’t require as much ground-based infrastructure to operate. Rather than laying fiber optic cables to connect new users, which is time consuming and expensive, satellite signals from space can be beamed to nearly any location on the surface of the earth. 

For countries looking to add internet service to large numbers of users without huge new infrastructure investments, like India, satellite-based internet service is an ideal solution. Satellite service is also beneficial to first responders working in remote locations where fiber optic connections are unavailable, such as search and rescue operations. 

How it Affects You

Starlink has grown by providing service to a wide range of users, and though this outage was the longest on record, as long as future disruptions remain limited and infrequent they are unlikely to hurt its reputation. For modern users internet outages are similar to power outages, such temporary inconveniences that have to be endured from time to time.