SpaceX’s satellite internet service Starlink experienced its most severe international disruption to date on Thursday, as an internal software failure severed connectivity for tens of thousands of users across multiple continents, Reuters reported.
The outage, which commenced at approximately 3 p.m. EDT (19:00 GMT), impacted users in the United States and Europe most acutely, triggering over 61,000 incident reports to the outage tracking platform Downdetector within hours. Starlink acknowledged the crisis via its official X account, stating: “We are actively implementing a solution.”
Michael Nicolls, Vice-President of Starlink Engineering, confirmed service was “mostly resumed after 2.5 hours,” attributing the disruption to a “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk issued a public apology, pledging:
SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
This incident marks the most prolonged service interruption since Starlink evolved into a major global provider, serving over 6 million customers across 140 countries through a constellation exceeding 8,000 low-Earth orbit satellites.
The global scale of the disruption proved particularly unusual for a network specifically engineered for resilience through distributed architecture. Industry experts immediately speculated whether the cause involved a flawed software update, systemic glitch, or cyberattack.
Gregory Falco, Director of Cornell University’s space cybersecurity laboratory, noted parallels with the 2024 CrowdStrike incident paralysing global aviation and healthcare systems and affecting 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices:
I’d speculate this is a bad software update, not entirely dissimilar to the CrowdStrike mess with Windows last year, or a cyberattack.
The disruption also raised questions about potential cascading effects on SpaceX’s classified Starshield operations. This separate satellite division holds billion-dollar contracts with the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies for sensitive reconnaissance activities.
