Elon Musk apologises after major global outage hits Starlink

The tech billionaire Elon Musk has issued a brief apology after SpaceX’s satellite-based internet service, Starlink, experienced a significant global outage on Thursday.

Taking to his social platform X (formerly Twitter), Musk stated, “Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy the root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

The global outage left tens of thousands of users without connectivity and lasted approximately two and a half hours before connectivity was restored.

According to Downdetector, the outage-tracking site, the issue began around 3pm Eastern Time, with over 61,000 users reporting problems with their service.

SpaceX’s Vice President of Engineering, Michael Nicolls, addressed the incident in a post on X.

He explained that the outage was caused by a “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.”

“We apologise for the temporary disruption in our service. We are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network and will fully investigate the root cause to ensure it does not happen again,” he added.

This disruption is one of the most severe in Starlink’s relatively short history. 

Since its public rollout in 2020, Starlink has launched more than 8,000 satellites into low-Earth orbit and now serves over six million users across 140 countries.

The service has proven especially valuable in remote areas, during natural disasters, and for military applications where traditional internet infrastructure is limited or unavailable.