SpaceX has recently confirmed that the widespread Starlink outage that occurred last week was due to an internal network upgrade gone wrong. This outage, which lasted for an extended period of time and is the longest on record for Starlink, affected millions of users across North America and even as far as Ukraine.
Initially, SpaceX attributed the outage to a “failure of key internal software services,” but later clarified that it was actually caused by a software upgrade procedure targeting the service’s ground-based compute clusters. According to industry sources familiar with the situation, a series of events during the upgrade led to an overload of the system while redistributing traffic across its computing infrastructure, resulting in the widespread downtime.
While most users were able to regain connectivity within approximately 2.5 hours, some continued to experience issues with their service into the following day and over the weekend. This outage has been the longest and most disruptive in Starlink’s history.
Starlink currently boasts over 6 million customers globally, with a significant number in the U.S. and Canada. The service has proven to be essential in rural and remote areas, as well as in regions affected by conflict such as Ukraine.
Interestingly, some Starlink users have reported faster speeds since the outage. This has led to speculation that the outage may have been tied to a performance-enhancing upgrade. However, others have noted that their service has been spotty or sluggish since the outage. For users still experiencing connectivity issues, Starlink’s support page recommends power cycling and rebooting all Starlink and third-party equipment.
SpaceX executive Michael Nicolls has issued an apology for the outage and has reassured users that they are committed to providing a highly reliable network. They are actively working to identify the root cause of the issue and ensure that it does not happen again in the future.