Starlink outage leaves thousands offline in US: Elon Musk says 'sorry' amid internet blackout. What went wrong?

Tech billionaire Elon Musk's satellite internet firm Starlink was hit by a massive global outage Thursday and thousands of users unable to get online in US. Over 60,000 global users reported issues and reports of disruption began at surge around 8pm GMT, according to Downdetector. In the UK alone, more than 10,000 users flagged problems with the service from 8pm.

Of the reported issues with Starlink, 68% said there was a “total blackout.” Starlink’s official account posted on X, formerly Twitter, and acknowledged the outage and reassured users it was working on a solution.

"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 post read.


Starlink is the world's most widely satellite internet service and it faced disruptions across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, causing inconvenience to thousands of users. Users reported sudden loss of connectivity, slow speeds, and unresponsive terminals.

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Elon Musk responds to Starlink's outage

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. The Tesla CEO addressed the issue several hours later on X (formerly Twitter), attributing the outage to a configuration error during a routine software update. Elon Musk described the incident as a "cascading failure triggered by a single node update" and called the situation embarrassing but fixable.

Doug Madory, from internet analysis firm Kentik, said the outage appeared to have started around 3:13pm ET (7:30pm GMT), and noted that incidents of this scale were rare. “They haven't had one like this in a long time,” he told Reuters.

As per statements from SpaceX engineers, Starlink outage was caused due to a failure in key internal software update that operate the core Starlink network. Engineers hunted for the root cause of one of its biggest international outages the night before, a rare disruption for the powerful internet system set off by an internal software failure.

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Michael Nicolls, SpaceX vice president of Starlink Engineering, told Reuters, "The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,". Nicolls apologized for the disruption and vowing to find its cause.

Doug Madory, an expert at the internet analysis firm Kentik, said such a sweeping global outage was unusual. "This is likely the longest outage ever for Starlink, at least while it became a major service provider," Madory said.

A routine software update was in place to enhance inter-stallite communication performance and latency but it introduced a crucial misconfiguration that disrupted how satellites relay data to one another. As a result, communication links between satellites degraded and many ground terminals lost connection to the broader internet.

Frustrated Starlink users took to social media to express their anger. One posted: “You guys gonna reimburse us for this massive outage that's got me kicked out of work?” Another complained: “I couldn’t attend a meeting, now I’m in serious trouble. You owe us a refund.”

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What is Starlink?

Starlink, active in roughly 140 countries and territories and used by a growing number of militaries and government agencies, is a key source of revenue for Elon Musk's SpaceX. The network has grown rapidly since 2020 into a disruptive force in the satellite communications industry. As Starlink amasses more than 6 million users, SpaceX has focused in recent months on updating its network to accommodate demands for higher speed and bandwidth.

Since 2020, SpaceX has deployed over 8,000 Starlink satellites, creating a one-of-a-kind, widely distributed network in low-Earth orbit. This system has drawn strong interest from militaries, transportation sectors, and rural consumers lacking reliable access to conventional fiber-optic internet.

(With Reuters input)