SpaceX’s Starlink suffered one of\u00a0its biggest international outages on Thursday when an internal\u00a0 software failure knocked tens of thousands of users offline, a\u00a0rare disruption for Elon Musk’s powerful satellite internet\u00a0system.<\/p>\n
Users began experiencing the outage\u00a0at around 3 p.m. ET, according to Downdetector, a\u00a0crowdsourced outage tracker that said as many as 61,000 user\u00a0reports to the site were made.<\/p>\n
Starlink, which has more than 6 million users across roughly\u00a0 140 countries and territories, later acknowledged the outage on\u00a0its X account and said “we are actively implementing a\u00a0solution.”<\/p>\n
Starlink service mostly resumed after 2.5 hours, Michael\u00a0Nicolls, Starlink vice president of Starlink Engineering, wrote\u00a0on X.<\/p>\n
“The outage was due to failure of key internal software\u00a0services that operate the core network,” Nicolls said,\u00a0apologizing for the disruption and vowing to find its root\u00a0cause.<\/p>\n
Musk had also apologized: “Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will\u00a0remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” the SpaceX\u00a0CEO wrote on X.<\/p>\n
The outage was a rare hiccup for SpaceX’s most commercially\u00a0sensitive business that had experts speculating whether the\u00a0service, known for its resilience and rapid growth, was beset by\u00a0a glitch, a botched software update or even a cyberattack.<\/p>\n
Doug Madory, an expert at the internet analysis firm Kentik,\u00a0said the outage was global and that such a sweeping interruption\u00a0was unusual.<\/p>\n
“This is likely the longest outage ever for Starlink, at\u00a0least while it became a major service provider,” Madory said.<\/p>\n
As Starlink gained more users, SpaceX has focused heavily in\u00a0recent months on updating its network to accommodate demands for\u00a0higher speed and bandwidth.<\/p>\n
The satellite internet company is widely used in Canada’s northern communities.\u00a0Starlink has been\u00a0credited with keeping groups safe<\/a>\u00a0while on the land and giving residents a way to\u00a0access online classes and health services.<\/p>\n