Investigation Underway into Starlink Global Outage

As engineers at the SpaceX Satellite Network company, one of Elon Musk’s business empire worked to identify the underlying reason of one of SpaceX’s largest international outages the previous evening—a rare disruption for the potent internet system caused by an internal software failure—the company’s Starlink satellite network was back up and operating on Friday (local time).

Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage tracker, reported that up to 61,000 user reports were made to the website, indicating that users in the US and Europe started to experience the outage at approximately 3pm EDT Thursday (7am NZST Friday).

Service was “down across the entire front” in Ukraine, where soldiers mostly depend on Starlink for battlefield communications, according to Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s drone forces. 

A major source of income for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Starlink operates in about 140 nations and territories and is utilized by an increasing number of armed forces and governmental organizations. Since 2020, the network has expanded quickly, becoming a major player in the satellite communications sector.

In response to Thursday’s X account outage, Starlink stated that “we are actively implementing a solution.”

After two and a half hours, SpaceX vice president of Starlink Engineering Michael Nicolls posted on X that the service had largely been restored. The “network issue has been resolved, and Starlink service has been restored” was posted on X by the firm by 8 p.m. 

Nicolls simply apologized for the disturbance and promised to investigate for the actual cause. “The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,” he said.

Musk expressed regret for the outage as well. To make sure it doesn’t happen again, SpaceX will address the underlying reason,” the company’s CEO wrote on X.

For SpaceX’s most commercially sensitive company, the interruption was an uncommon setback. Experts conjectured if the service, which is renowned for its robustness and rapid development, was plagued by a bug, a poorly executed software update, or possibly a cyberattack.

Such a widespread worldwide outage is unprecedented, according to Doug Madory, an analyst with the internet intelligence company Kentik.

“This is likely the longest outage ever for Starlink, at least while it became a major service provider,” Madory stated.

In recent months, SpaceX has concentrated on modernizing its network to meet requests for increased speed and bandwidth as Starlink grows to over 6 million subscribers.

In order to provide direct-to-cell text messaging services, a business model that enables mobile phone customers to send emergency text messages through the network in rural areas—the company is also extending the constellation with bigger, more potent satellites in collaboration with T-Mobile. 

Since 2020, SpaceX has launched over 8000 Starlink satellites, creating a distinctively dispersed network in low-Earth orbit that has drawn high demand from the military, the transportation sector, and rural residents who have limited access to standard fibre-based internet.

Gregory Falco, director of a Cornell University space and cybersecurity lab, “I’d speculate this is a bad software update, not entirely dissimilar to the CrowdStrike mess with Windows last year, or a cyberattack.”

In July of last year, an update to CrowdStrike’s popular cybersecurity software affected businesses globally and resulted in aircraft cancellations all over the world. 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices were impacted by the outage, which interfered with internet access.

The impact of Thursday’s outage on SpaceX’s other satellite-based services that depend on the Starlink network was not immediately apparent. The company’s military satellite business subsidiary, Starshield, has contracts worth billions of dollars with US intelligence agencies and the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, during a crucial offensive by Ukraine to regain land in its conflict with Russia in late September 2022, Musk ordered a temporary suspension of Starlink, according to a report published by Reuters on Friday.