• Starlink experienced a major global outage affecting thousands of users in the US and other countries.
• The outage, lasting over two hours, was due to a software failure during an update.
• Elon Musk apologized, assuring users that measures will be taken to prevent future incidents.

Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by SpaceX, faced a significant global outage on Thursday, impacting thousands of users across the United States, Canada, Europe, and other regions. The outage began around 3 p.m. EDT, leading to a surge of over 61,000 reports on outage tracker Downdetector, indicating widespread connectivity disruptions, including slow internet speeds and complete blackouts, according to Newsweek, India Times, and Al Jazeera.

The outage, which lasted approximately two and a half hours, was attributed to a failure in key internal software services critical for network operations. Michael Nicolls, Starlink's vice president of engineering, explained that the issue stemmed from a configuration error during a routine software update, which disrupted communication between satellites, thus affecting ground terminal connections, reports India Times and Reuters.

Elon Musk publicly apologized for the inconvenience, asserting that SpaceX would identify and fix the root cause of the failure to prevent future occurrences. "Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again," Musk stated on X (formerly Twitter), according to Reuters, Dawn, and India Times.

Experts have noted that such a significant disruption is rare for Starlink, particularly due to its growing reliance among military and commercial users for critical communications. Doug Madory, an internet analysis expert from Kentik, highlighted this incident as one of the longest outages Starlink has experienced to date, revealing potential vulnerabilities associated with software updates, reports Reuters and Newsweek.