Starlink internet faces global outage, services disrupted in 140 countries

New Delhi: Elon Musk’s satellite-based internet service, Starlink, experienced a rare and massive outage today, affecting millions of users across 140 countries. Known for its high-reliability connectivity, Starlink’s systems suddenly went offline, leaving many users without internet access.

According to a Reuters report, the issue was caused by a major internal software failure. As a result, thousands of routers linked to Starlink lost connectivity simultaneously. The platform, known for offering seamless service even during emergencies via satellite links, shocked users with this unexpected downtime.

Typically, satellite-based services like Starlink are less prone to outages, which makes this disruption particularly unusual. The company is yet to issue a detailed public statement regarding the full scope of the failure or when services will be fully restored.

Starlink confirmed the outage in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), where the company posted, “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 company said.

Michael Nicolls, VP of Starlink Engineering (at SpaceX), later posted another update stating that the internet services are nearly recovered, and the network outage lasted for approximately 2.5 hours only.

He posted, “Starlink has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours. The outage was due to the failure of key internal software services that operate the core network. We apologise 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.”

The outage was first noted and posted (by Starlink’s official X page) at approximately 1:35 AM IST on July 25. And at 3:53 AM IST, Michael Nicolls posted about the recovery of the network in various regions, along with an apology for the temporary disruption.