Global Starlink outage shows peril of relying on giant tech companies

Hines Brian July 24, 2025No Comments

When Starlink, Space X's satellite internet service, is working, it's a gigantic plus for people like me who have no other viable broadband options. But when Starlink goes offline, as it did today, it can be a huge pain.

As I've learned over the past 4 1/2 years after I became a beta tester soon after Starlink was rolled out, when it comes to troubleshooting, users are pretty much on their own — at least initially. There's no phone number to call for customer support. You have to put in a support ticket via the Starlink app. Sometimes those are responded to quickly; sometimes they aren't.

This afternoon our Starlink wi-fi went bye-bye. Our router had been replaced by Starlink after it broke several months ago, so I doubted it was the problem. I did the usual thing: unplug the router, then restart it and hope the satellite connection is restored.

Didn't work.

I got indications on the Starlink app that satellites had been contacted and Starlink now was optimizing connections. I waited half an hour or so for this to happen, then gave up and restarted the router again. When that didn't work, I got out a spare router that I'd bought and switched it with the current router.

Still no luck.

But after about an hour of troubleshooting efforts, I saw that a notice had popped up on the app saying that there was an outage in our area. I thought, "Thanks for the news. I just wish the notice had been sent much sooner so I wouldn't have wasted time trying to figure out what the problem was."

When I drove into Salem (Oregon) with my wife to pick up a patio table that we'd ordered, I was able to fire up Facebook and see what was being talked about on a public Starlink discussion group. This post immediately caught my eye.

Comments had been disabled after well over a hundred Starlink users had weighed in on whether they still had a connection. Some did. Most didn't. There were "I'm out" responses from all over the world. The United States, Africa, Europe, Canada.

Turns out it was a global outage. A Reuters story says:

SpaceX's Starlink suffered one of its biggest international outages on Thursday when an internal software failure knocked tens of thousands of users offline, a rare disruption for Elon Musk's powerful satellite internet system.

Users in the U.S. and Europe began experiencing the outage at around 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT), according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage tracker that said as many as 61,000 user reports to the site were made.

Starlink, which has more than 6 million users across roughly 140 countries and territories, later acknowledged the outage on its X account and said "we are actively implementing a solution."

Starlink service mostly resumed after 2.5 hours, Michael Nicolls, Starlink vice president of Starlink Engineering, wrote on X.

"The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network," Nicolls said, apologizing for the disruption and vowing to find its root cause.

Musk had also apologized: "Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again," the SpaceX CEO wrote on X.

It sure seems like the outage could have been caused by hacking, though I doubt Starlink would admit to this if it happened, as it might encourage other hackers. It'd just be really surprising if a software update was the culprit, as I'd expect that Starlink would have tested the update before installing it.

This global Starlink outage shows how dependent the world has become on giant tech corporations. In the old pre-internet days, telephone service was highly local. There were lots of companies providing telephone service. If an outage occurred, it didn't affect many people.

Now most of us use cellular services to make calls and do all the other stuff our smart phones are capable of. If Verizon goes down nationwide, many millions of people are affected. Including us, as that's the cellular service we use. But we only have 1 bar of coverage at our house in rural south Salem, so we have a signal booster Verizon gave us — which requires an internet connection, so when Starlink is offline, it's very frustrating to use my dreadfully slow iPhone's cellular connection.

Starlink customers mostly lack other broadband options. If they had them, they wouldn't be paying $120 a month, as we do, for decent speeds that still are lower than fiber optic broadband. So when Starlink goes down, we're screwed. It's good that the current outage only lasted a few hours. But there's no guarantee that Starlink, or any other giant communications company, eventually isn't going to experience a major problem that lasts days or even weeks.

That's scary, given how dependent most of us are on a decent broadband connection.