Elon Musk’s Starlink restores service after major outage hits tens of thousands

Starlink, the satellite internet service founded by Elon Musk, has successfully restored its operations following a significant outage that affected tens of thousands of users across the United States and beyond early Monday morning. Reports from the outage monitoring site Downdetector indicated that disruptions peaked at over 43,000 reports in the US before tapering off to under 1,000 by 1:15 a.m. ET (05:15 GMT). During the outage, Starlink briefly acknowledged the situation on its website, noting that its engineers were investigating the issue. However, this message was later removed without further clarification. The outage map displayed on Downdetector highlighted network issues affecting major cities such as Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Seattle, and Chicago. In Ukraine, where Starlink has become vital for military operations and drone communications, officials confirmed that the disruption impacted frontline activities in the ongoing conflict with Russia. Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s drone forces, referred to the incident as a “global outage at SpaceX,” mentioning that service began to resume approximately 30 minutes after the initial failure was detected at 07:28 local time (04:28 GMT). Currently, Ukraine operates over 50,000 Starlink terminals, provided by SpaceX, which are crucial for secure communications in war zones and remote areas lacking reliable infrastructure. While service interruptions are not commonly experienced, the extent of this outage raised concerns about the system's reliability, especially as it is increasingly relied upon for both civilian and military communications. As of now, SpaceX has not released any detailed information regarding the cause of the outage. Users took to X to express their discontent, with many tagging Musk directly in hopes of a response regarding the disruption.