Starlink suffers serious global outage

SpaceX's Starlink suffered one of the biggest international outages on July 24 (local time) when an internal software bug left tens of thousands of users offline, a rare disruption to the

Internal software bug causes global Starlink outage
The outage lasted for 2.5 hours, affecting tens of thousands of users. The cause was initially speculated to be a software update or a cyber attack.

The problem appeared on the afternoon of July 24 when a series of users reported losing connection. Photo: JC Chris

According to Downdetector, a community outage tracker that reported 61,000 user reports to the site, users in the United States and Europe began experiencing outages around 3 p.m. ET.

Starlink, which has more than 6 million users across some 140 countries and territories, later acknowledged the outage on its X account, saying "we are actively working on a solution."

"The outage was caused by a failure of critical internal software services that operate the core network," Michael Nicolls, Starlink's vice president of Starlink Engineering, wrote on X, apologizing for the disruption and pledging to find the root cause.

Boss Elon Musk also posted an apology: "Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will fix the root cause to ensure this doesn't happen again."

The outage was a rare incident for SpaceX's most sensitive business, leading experts to speculate whether the service, known for its resilience and rapid growth, was affected by a glitch, a faulty software update or even a cyberattack.

Doug Madory, an expert at internet analytics firm Kentik, said the outage was global and such widespread disruption was unusual.

Data analysis shows a huge number of affected users, across many different countries and regions. Photo: Cisco Thounsand Eyes

“This is likely the longest outage Starlink has ever had, at least since the company became a major service provider,” Madory said.

As Starlink gains more users, SpaceX has focused heavily on updating its network in recent months to meet demand for higher speeds and bandwidth.

The company is also expanding its constellation with larger, more powerful satellites to provide direct text messaging to mobile phones, a business in which mobile phone users can send emergency text messages over the network in rural areas.

SpaceX has launched more than 8,000 Starlink satellites since 2020, building a uniquely distributed network in low Earth orbit that has attracted huge demand from the military, transportation industry and consumers in rural areas that have difficulty accessing traditional fiber-optic internet.

“I think this is either a bad software update, not unlike the CrowdStrike incident with Windows last year, or a cyberattack,” said Gregory Falco, director of the space and cybersecurity lab at Cornell University.

An update to CrowdStrike, a widely used cybersecurity software, led to worldwide flight cancellations and impacted industries across the globe last July. The outage disrupted internet services, affecting 8.5 million Microsoft users.

It was not immediately clear whether Thursday’s outage would affect SpaceX’s other satellite services that rely on the Starlink network. Starshield, the company’s military satellite business unit, has billions of dollars in contracts with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.