Global interruption impacts Elon Musk's Starlink web service worldwide, revealing key details about the situation.
Starlink, the satellite internet constellation operated by SpaceX, experienced a worldwide outage on Thursday, affecting users in over 130 countries and territories. The outage, which lasted approximately two and a half hours, caused widespread loss of connectivity across multiple continents, including North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
The root cause of the outage was an internal software glitch triggered by a routine update that caused a malfunction in the satellite network's core communication services. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, and Starlink engineers described the incident as a "cascading failure triggered by a single node update."
Users reported seeing error messages indicating "no healthy upstream," and institutions relying heavily on Starlink, such as the Ukrainian military, reported significant impacts. More than 60,000 reports of issues were reported on Down Detector, with reports coming from Europe, the United States, Africa, Asia, and Australia.
SpaceX, in a statement, apologised for the disruption and assured users that the root cause will be addressed to prevent recurrence. It is unclear whether T-Mobile's satellite service was affected by or involved in the outage, as Starlink's public service rolled out a day before the outage.
As of Friday morning, some Starlink users reported that their network was still down. SpaceX plans to have 12,000 satellites and aims to have more than 34,000 eventually. It remains to be seen how countries and governments, such as Ukraine's army, that rely on Starlink for internet access, will be affected by the outage.
In conclusion, the global Starlink outage was caused by an internal software glitch during a routine update, resulting in a malfunction in the satellite network's core communication services. Starlink engineers are working diligently to address the issue and prevent future occurrences.
The internal software glitch during a routine update on Starlink, a satellite internet constellation operated by SpaceX, affected technology systems, causing a malfunction in space-and-astronomy related core communication services. The outage, impacting over 130 countries and territories, disrupted science-based institutions like the Ukrainian military that rely on Starlink's satellite internet.
