On Thursday (July 24), a major disruption occurred in the “Starlink” service of SpaceX, one of the most serious international service interruptions in its history, impacting tens of thousands of users. This rare event greatly affected Elon Musk’s powerful satellite internet system.
The service interruption was caused by an internal software malfunction, resulting in tens of thousands of users being offline.
According to the crowdsourced fault tracking platform Downdetector, around 3 pm Eastern Time (19:00 GMT), Starlink users in the United States and Europe began experiencing service interruptions. The platform reported receiving up to 61,000 user reports.
Starlink has over six million users in approximately 140 countries and regions worldwide. SpaceX later acknowledged the service disruption on the X platform, stating that they are actively implementing solutions.
Michael Nicolls, Vice President of Engineering at Starlink, wrote on the X platform that the service was largely restored 2.5 hours after the incident occurred.
“This interruption was due to a failure of a critical internal software service responsible for running the core network,” Nicolls said, expressing apologies for the disruption and vowing to identify the root cause.
SpaceX CEO Musk also posted an apology on the X platform, stating, “We apologize for this interruption. SpaceX will address the root cause to ensure this situation does not happen again.”
Starlink service is SpaceX’s most commercially sensitive business, and this service interruption is a rare incident for this business. Experts speculate whether this service, known for its flexibility and rapid growth, was troubled by a malfunction, software update error, or even a network attack.
Doug Madory, an expert from internet analysis company Kentik, stated that this disruption was global, and such a widespread interruption is highly unusual.
He said, “This may be the longest outage in the history of ‘Starlink,’ at least since it became a major service provider.”
With the increasing number of Starlink users, SpaceX has been aggressively upgrading its network in the past few months to meet users’ demands for higher speeds and bandwidth.
The company collaborates with T-Mobile and is also expanding its satellite constellation by launching larger and more powerful satellites to provide direct SMS services to mobile phones. This business model allows mobile users to send emergency messages via the Starlink network in rural areas.
(Translated and rewritten from a report by Reuters)