It has not been the best of weeks for Elon Musk. Poor Tesla results on Wednesday were followed by a rare Starlink outage last night that lasted for more than two hours.
The internet was abuzz last night with reports from users unable to access their Starlink satellite service. The reports began around 8pm Irish time with over 60,000 users reporting outages on the DownDetector website, which crowdsources internet service downtimes. Disruption reports came in from every continent.
It has not been a great week for Elon Musk. Tesla shares dipped by more than 5pc after an earnings report on Wednesday that saw the EV maker report the lowest quarterly revenues in a decade. It was 1.18am Irish time by the time the Starlink service had been fully restored, according to a post on X.
“The network issue has been resolved, and Starlink service has been restored. We understand how important connectivity is and apologise for the disruption,” wrote the company.
According to Michael Nicolls, VP of Starlink Engineering at SpaceX, the outage lasted over 2.5 hours and he attributed the problem – again on a post on X – to “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network”.
Starlink’s satellite internet service is believed to have around 6m users in some 140 countries, and is a crucial commercial arm of Musk’s space-tech company SpaceX. It provides high-speed internet to remote parts of the world via low-Earth orbit satellites, which usually operate at altitudes of up to 2,000km from the Earth’s surface and can provide cheaper and more efficient connectivity than those at higher altitudes. It is famously being used in Ukraine during the Russian hostilities.
The service is available in most parts of western and central Europe, North and South America, south-east Asia, Oceania and Japan, as well as in some parts of Africa. There are more than 7,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, according to astronomer Jonathan McDowell who tracks the constellation on his website. The company is estimated to own around 60pc of active satellites orbiting Earth.
Last year, China launched its own version of Starlink satellites to compete with SpaceX in providing high-speed internet services from space. Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology, a state-owned company that makes low-Earth orbit satellites similar to Starlink, launched 18 satellites into space.
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