SpaceX's Starlink suffered one of its biggest international outages on Thursday when an internal software failure knocked tens of thousands of users offline, a rare disruption for Elon Musk's powerful satellite internet system.
Users in the US and Europe began experiencing the outage at around 3pm EDT (1900 GMT), according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage tracker that said as many as 61,000 user reports to the site were made.
Starlink, which has more than six million users across roughly 140 countries and territories, later acknowledged the outage on its X account and said "we are actively implementing a solution."
Starlink service mostly resumed after 2.5 hours, Michael Nicolls, Starlink vice president of Starlink Engineering, wrote on X.
"The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network," Nicolls said, apologizing for the disruption and vowing to find its root cause.
Musk had also apologized: "Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again," the SpaceX CEO wrote on X.
The outage was a rare hiccup for SpaceX's most commercially sensitive business that had experts speculating whether the service, known for its resilience and rapid growth, was beset by a glitch, a botched software update or even a cyberattack.
Doug Madory, an expert at the internet analysis firm Kentik, said the outage was global and that such a sweeping interruption was unusual.
"This is likely the longest outage ever for Starlink, at least while it became a major service provider," Madory said.
As Starlink gained more users, SpaceX has focused heavily in recent months on updating its network to accommodate demands for higher speed and bandwidth.
The company in a partnership with T-Mobile is also expanding the constellation with larger, more powerful satellites to offer direct-to-cell text messaging services, a line of business in which mobile phone users can send emergency text messages through the network in rural areas.
SpaceX has launched more than 8,000 Starlink satellites since 2020, building a uniquely distributed network in low-Earth orbit that has attracted intense demand from militaries, transportation industries and consumers in rural areas with poor access to traditional, fiber-based internet.
"I'd speculate this is a bad software update, not entirely dissimilar to the CrowdStrike mess with Windows last year, or a cyberattack," said Gregory Falco, director of a space and cybersecurity laboratory at Cornell University.
An update to CrowdStrike's widely used cybersecurity software led to worldwide flight cancellations and impacted industries around the globe in July last year. The outage disrupted internet services, affecting 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices.
It was unclear whether Thursday's outage affected SpaceX's other satellite-based services that rely on the Starlink network. Starshield, the company's military satellite business unit, has billions of dollars' worth of contracts with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.
Ukraine says Starlink's global outage hit its military communications
Starlink systems used by Ukrainian military units were down for two and a half hours overnight, a senior commander said, part of a global issue that disrupted the satellite internet provider.
Ukraine's forces are heavily reliant on thousands of SpaceX's Starlink terminals for battlefield communications and some drone operations, as they have proved resistant to espionage and signal jamming throughout the three and a half years of fighting Russia's invasion.
"Starlink is down across the entire front," Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine's drone forces, wrote on Telegram at 10:41 p.m. (1941 GMT) on Thursday.
Brovdi updated his post later to say that by about 1:05am on Friday the issue had been resolved. He said the incident had highlighted the risk of reliance on the systems, and called for communication and connectivity methods to be diversified.
"Combat missions were performed without a (video) feed, battlefield reconnaissance was done with strike (drones)," Brovdi wrote.
A Ukrainian drone commander, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive matters, told Reuters his unit had to postpone several combat operations as a result of the outage.
Oleksandr Dmitriev, the founder of OCHI, a Ukrainian system that centralises feeds from thousands of drone crews across the frontline, told Reuters the outage showed that relying on cloud services to command units and relay battlefield drone reconnaissance was a "huge risk".
"If connection to the internet is lost ... the ability to conduct combat operations is practically gone," he said, calling for a move towards local communication systems that are not reliant on the internet.
Reuters reported on Friday that Starlink owner Elon Musk issued an order in 2022 to cut Starlink coverage in certain areas of Ukraine as Ukrainian forces were waging a counter-offensive to take back occupied land from Russia.
As of April 2025, according to Ukrainian government social media posts, Kyiv has received more than 50,000 Starlink terminals.
Although Starlink does not operate in Russia, Ukrainian officials have said that Moscow's troops are also widely using the systems on the frontlines in Ukraine.
"The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network," Starlink vice president Michael Nicolls wrote on X, apologising for the disruption and vowing to find its root cause.
