Washington: Elon Musk’s Starlink Internet Service went down over large parts of the world on Thursday, leaving tens of thousands of users offline.
The rare global power outage was caused by a failure of the system’s internal software.
The service, which usually runs smoothly, faced a 2.5-hour blackout before engineers made things work again.
Starlink apologized and promised to solve the problem to stop it in the future.
Users in the US and Europe began to experience the power outage around 10 pm. 15 EDT (1900 GMT), according to Downdetector, a crowd-sourced power outage was made that said as many as 61,000 user reports were made for the site.
Starlink, which has more than 6 million users over approx. 140 countries and territories, later acknowledged the power outage on its X account and said “We are actively implementing a solution.”
The Starlink service mostly resumed after 2.5 hours, Michael Nicolls, Starlink’s vice president of engineering, wrote at X.
“The stop was due to failure in important internal software services that drive the core network,” Nicolls said, apologizing for the disturbance and law to find its root cause.
Musk also apologized, “Sorry for the power. SpaceX will alleviate the root cause of making sure it doesn’t happen again,” SpaceX CEO wrote on X.
The stop was a rare hiccup for SpaceX’s most commercially sensitive business and had experts wondering about the service – known for its resilience and rapid growth – was hit by a mistake, a broken software update or even a cyberattack.
Doug Madory, an expert in the internet analysis company Kentik, said the power breaking was global and that such a sweeping interruption was unusual.
“This is probably the longest power outage ever for Starlink, at least while it became an important service provider,” Madory said.
As Starlink has got more users, SpaceX has focused strongly in recent months on updating its network to meet the demand for higher speed and bandwidth.
The company, in a partnership with T-Mobile, is also expanding the constellation with larger, more powerful satellites to offer direct-to-cell text messages-what allows mobile phone users to send emergency texts through the network of rural areas.
SpaceX has launched more than 8,000 Starlink satellites since 2020 and built a uniquely distributed low-ground network that has attracted a strong demand from military, transport industries and consumers in rural areas with poor access to traditional, fiber-based internet.
“I would speculate that this is a bad software update, not quite different from Crowdstrike Mess with Windows last year, or a cyberattack,” said Gregory Falco, director of a space and cyber security laboratory at Cornell University.
An update to Crowdstrikes widely used cyber security software led to worldwide cancellations and affected industries across the globe last July. Stop breakdown disrupted Internet services and affected 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices.
It was unclear whether Thursday’s power outage affected SpaceX’s other satellite-based services that depend on the Starlink network. Starshield, the company’s military satellite unit, has billions of dollars worth of contracts with Pentagon and US intelligence agencies.
