Hawthorne, California – Elon Musk‘s Starlink satellite internet service experienced an hours-long global network outage Thursday, which executives attributed to a key software issue.
The service interruption was announced on X at about 4:00 PM ET on Thursday by Starlink’s official handle.
Users in the US and Europe began reporting problems on Downdetector an hour before the Starlink announcement.
“Service will be restored shortly,” Musk posted on X, apologizing for the outage. “SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
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The far-right billionaire later reposted a statement from Starlink Vice President of Engineering Michael Nicolls, who said the disruption was due to the “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.”
Nicolls also said the Starlink network had “mostly recovered” from the outage, which “lasted approximately 2.5 hours.”
About two hours later, Starlink posted that the issue was resolved and that service was restored.
Starlink, a subsidiary of Musk’s space rocket venture SpaceX, has deployed more than 6,000 low-orbit satellites to provide high-speed internet to isolated and poorly connected areas.
It currently leads the satellite internet race, with European competitor Eutelsat – which is backed by France and the United Kingdom – lagging far behind with 600 satellites.
