Reports on Down Detector surged past 65,000 as frustrated customers flagged the disruption. Starlink confirmed the problem on X, saying it was “actively implementing a solution” to restore service.
Ironically, the outage struck only hours after SpaceX and T-Mobile announced that their joint effort to eliminate cellular dead zones across the US had officially moved out of beta testing. The service, dubbed T-Satellite, was also made available to Verizon and AT&T customers, relying on more than 650 Starlink satellites to fill gaps in rural coverage.
Starlink has grown rapidly, now serving more than six million users worldwide. Earlier this month, SpaceX boasted that its network delivers average download speeds of 180 Mbps with latency below 55 milliseconds. But the sheer scale of its roughly 8,000-satellite constellation sometimes struggles in areas with dense user demand, making it vulnerable to large-scale disruptions like this one.
The outage escalated quickly. At 3:10 p.m. Eastern Time, Down Detector logged around 7,800 complaints. Within 15 minutes, reports ballooned to more than 61,000. Social media lit up with users in the US and abroad complaining that they had lost access. Even a community-run Starlink status tracker went down under the sudden surge of traffic.
At 4:05 p.m., Starlink acknowledged the outage, promising a fix. SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk apologised to users on X, writing that the team “will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again and the service will be restored shortly.”
However, this isn’t the first time Starlink has stumbled. While the network has generally impressed users with its high speeds and low latency, it has suffered several notable outages as the constellation scales up. Past disruptions have been blamed on software updates gone wrong, satellite handover glitches, and occasional congestion in high-demand areas.
The network’s sheer size, roughly 8,000 satellites in orbit, is its strength and its weakness. It can blanket the planet with connectivity, but a single system failure or flawed update can ripple across millions of users at once.
Starlink now serves more than six million customers globally, including businesses, airlines and governments. As it moves deeper into mainstream telecom partnerships, expectations for reliability will only increase. Analysts say that while occasional hiccups are expected in any large-scale network, outages of this scale could give rival satellite providers an opening, particularly for government contracts and enterprise deals where uptime is non-negotiable.
Amazon’s Project Kuiper and OneWeb, have been positioning themselves as potential alternatives with an emphasis on reliability and redundancy. Today’s disruption hands those competitors a marketing gift, highlighting the risks of relying too heavily on a single mega-constellation.
