Thousands of users across the world lost internet access on Thursday, July 24, after a rare global outage hit Starlink, the satellite internet service run by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The disruption began around 3:13 pm ET and lasted for several hours. Starlink confirmed the issue, saying, “Starlink is currently in a network outage and we are actively implementing a solution.”
Elon Musk followed up with a personal apology, assuring users that service would return soon.
According to Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Kentik, the incident was serious. “They’re not carrying any traffic right now,” he told Reuters. “This level of disruption is very unusual for Starlink; they haven’t had anything this widespread in a long time.”
By late afternoon, Downdetector logged over 60,000 user complaints globally. Reports came in from across the U.S., Europe, and other regions where Starlink provides service.
Interestingly, the outage happened just one day after T-Mobile launched its “T-Satellite” service, which uses Starlink’s network to connect phones directly to satellites. While no official link has been made, the timing raised eyebrows.
With more than 7,600 satellites and millions of users in over 70 countries, Starlink plays a critical role in global internet access especially in rural or underserved areas. As of Thursday evening, some connectivity had returned, though full restoration remained in progress.
Starlink has not released details on what caused the failure. However, Musk promised that SpaceX would “remedy the root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
