Starlink Down—What Caused The Global Outage And Is It Back Up Yet?
Reports that Starlink was down started flooding in on Down Detector at about 15:00 EST, numbering … More
Update July 25 at 13:28pm EDT: This article, originally published July 25 at 03:34am, has been updated to include the latest on what caused the outage, as well as reports of Ukrainian military units being impacted.
Elon Musk’s Starlink went down on Thursday afternoon, causing chaos across the globe. Reports that Starlink was down started flooding in on Down Detector at about 15:00 EST, numbering about 55,000 reports.
Of the reported issues with Starlink, 68% said there was a “total blackout.”
Starlink’s official account posted on X, formerly Twitter, to acknowledge the outage and reassure users it was working on a solution.
Elon Musk apologised for the outage of his Starlink network, on X. “SpaceX will remedy the root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” he wrote.
Satellite internet constellation Starlink provides network coverage for around 130 countries and territories, with the aim of offering global mobile broadband. Part of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the company is growing quickly. Over the past year, Starlink expanded to 42 new countries, territories and other markets around the world, according to a recent press release.
Elon Musk apologised for the outage of his Starlink network, on X formerly Twitter. “SpaceX will … More
How Long Was Starlink Down And Is It Back Up Yet?
The outage lasted around two hours. Now, Starlink seems to be mostly back up and running, but there were still reports of issues early on Friday.
“Still down here in the Philippines north Cotabato,” one user wrote on Down Detector.
“East Texas still down,” another user added.
However, users in Nesbit Mississippi and central California said they could now access Starlink services.
“Starlink has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours,” Michael Nicolls, VP of Starlink engineering at SpaceX wrote on X.
What Caused The Starlink Outage?
Nicolls says the outage was due to “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.”
“We apologize for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again, Nicolls wrote.
Could The Outage Have Been Caused By A Cyberattack?
It’s impossible to say for sure, but one expert told Reuters the Starlink outage could have been caused by a cyberattack. Gregory Falco, director of a space and cybersecurity laboratory at Cornell University compared the Starlink outage to the issue suffered by Crowdstrike last year as the result of a botched software update.
“I’d speculate this is a bad software update, not entirely dissimilar to the CrowdStrike mess with Windows last year, or a cyberattack,” he told Reuters.
The Crowdstrike incident affected numerous other services including anything that relied on Windows, in a similar way to the Starlink outage, which itself impacted Starlink systems used by Ukrainian military units.
Ukraine military units’ systems were down for two and a half hours overnight, according to Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s drone forces. He described on Telegram how combat missions were performed without a (video) feed, battlefield reconnaissance was done with strike (drones),” according to Reuters.
I have contacted Starlink owner SpaceX for a comment and will update this article if the firm responds.
It sounds like the outage was caused by a technical issue, but what specifically that means is difficult to say without more information. However, it’s unusual: Starlink users aren’t used to seeing outages of this size and the tens of thousands or more people who were affected will not be impressed by the service going down.