Musk's satellite internet goes dark: What caused Starlink's global outage?
What's the story
Elon Musk's satellite internet service, Starlink, suffered a major global outage last night. The disruption left tens of thousands of users unable to connect to the internet. According to DownDetector, reports of issues began pouring in around 8pm GMT. The problems lasted for several hours and affected users across multiple countries before service was restored this morning. As of July 2025, Starlink has over six million users worldwide, including over two million active customers in the US alone.
Apology issued
Musk apologizes to users
Responding to the widespread disruption, Musk apologized to Starlink users. He tweeted, "Service will be restored shortly. Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn't happen again." The company has since acknowledged that the network issue has been resolved and service has been restored.
Service restoration
Outage was caused by key internal software services failure
Despite claims of recovery, some users still reported service interruptions. The company said it was working to resolve these remaining issues. The outage was caused by a "failure of key internal software services that operate the core network," according to Michael Nicolls, VP of Starlink Engineering. He apologized for the disruption and assured users that they are committed to providing a reliable network and will investigate this issue thoroughly to prevent future occurrences.