Elon Musk’s Starlink Faces Longest Global Outage Yet — Cyberattack or Software Glitch?

A rare worldwide internet blackout hit Elon Musk’s Starlink service on Thursday, leaving tens of thousands of users offline for over two hours and raising concerns about the reliability of the world’s largest satellite network.

The outage began at 3 pm EDT and was reported by 61,000 users on Downdetector, primarily in the US and Europe, but the impact stretched globally.

Starlink, which boasts 6 million users in 140 countries, acknowledged the issue on its official X account. Michael Nicolls, VP of Engineering, later confirmed:

“The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.”

Service gradually resumed after 2.5 hours, but the disruption sparked speculation of a cyberattack or a bad software update, similar to the CrowdStrike incident last year that disrupted millions of Microsoft Windows devices worldwide.

Elon Musk also issued an apology, promising SpaceX would identify and fix the root cause to ensure it never happens again.

Experts, however, remain cautious:

• Doug Madory from Kentik called it “likely the longest and most widespread Starlink outage to date.”

• Gregory Falco, a cybersecurity specialist at Cornell, warned that the incident highlighted vulnerabilities in space-based internet infrastructure, suggesting it could be a botched software rollout or a cyberattack.

Starlink’s satellite network has become critical not only for remote consumers but also for military operations and emergency services, making any outage a potential national security concern.

SpaceX continues to expand its satellite fleet and is partnering with T-Mobile to enable direct-to-cell text messaging for emergency communications. It remains unclear if other SpaceX services like Starshield, used by the Pentagon, were affected.

With over 8,000 satellites in orbit, this marks a rare hiccup in Starlink’s otherwise strong track record for reliability.