Starlink Resolves Outage Affecting Tens Of Thousands, Musk Says Sorry

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service has been restored following a rare outage that affected tens of thousands of users.

“The network issue has been resolved, and Starlink service has been restored. We understand how important connectivity is and apologize for the disruption,” the Elon Musk-owned company said in a post on X.

Starlink users began experiencing problems at approximately 3 p.m. ET, according to crowdsourced outage tracker Downdetector, which reported that as many as 61,000 users had reported the outage on its website.

Michael Nicolls, the vice president of Starlink Engineering, said on X that the outage had lasted 2.5 hours and was due to the “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.” He apologized for the disruption and said that the company will identify the root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Musk also wrote on X that he was “sorry for the outage.”

Starlink operates in over 140 countries and has over 6 million customers. Since 2020, the company has launched over 8,000 satellites into Earth’s low orbit and garnered attention from militaries, airlines, and consumers in rural areas where traditional fibre-optic broadband is largely absent.

The company is expanding its capacity amid a surge in demand and upcoming launches in several countries. SpaceX launched two dozen Starlink satellites last week on its Falcon 9 rocket from California.

Retail sentiment on Stocktwits was in the ‘extremely bullish’ territory about T-Mobile US, with whom SpaceX has tied up to offer direct-to-cell text messaging services.

Musk’s companies have been under the spotlight ever since a public feud broke out between the South Africa-born billionaire and President Donald Trump. It was recently reported that Trump’s Golden Dome project is considering other companies beyond Starlink, such as Amazon (AMZN) and Kuiper, to diversify the pool of providers.

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