Starlink devices in Canada’s North lost service on Thursday afternoon, with the company reporting what appeared to be a worldwide outage.
While Starlink did not confirm how many users globally had lost service, the firm added a note to the front of its website stating: “Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage. Our team is investigating.”
Later, the company added on X: “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.”
Users in Kugluktuk, Nunavut and the NWT town of Hay River were among the first to contact Cabin Radio about a loss of service shortly after lunch on Thursday.
Starlink users and news organizations in the United States, United Kingdom and India also confirmed outages in those locations.
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Starlink’s website appeared to crash about an hour after the outage began, returning a “timed out” error message for some users trying to reach it.
“Service will be restored shortly,” read a short statement posted to X by Elon Musk, who owns Starlink operator SpaceX.
“Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
Some Starlink customers in the NWT said shortly after 4pm MT that their service had returned to normal.
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Just before 4:30pm, Starlink vice-president of engineer Michael Nicolls wrote online: “Starlink has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours.
“The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.
“We apologize for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again.”
Many northern Canadian communities have turned to Starlink in part because its satellite-based service has presented itself as a robust alternative to cable internet that can be disrupted by the likes of wildfires.
However, cable firms like Northwestel have argued that they offer on-the-ground support in the North in a way Starlink does not.
The NWT government had said earlier this year, as the US threatened tariffs, that it would look to move away from Starlink – a US-based product – as a service on which it relies. However, earlier this month, the GNWT told NNSL (itself US-owned) that it was struggling to find a comparable alternative.
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