A widespread outage Thursday afternoon affected Starlink services across the U.S. and other parts of the world.
Reports of service disruptions flooded outage tracker DownDetector, with users experiencing internet outages and, in some cases, total blackouts. Starlink and its founder, Elon Musk, confirmed the outage, with both saying that service would be restored shortly.
Starlink Outage: Where Issues Are Being Reported
According to DownDetector, problem reports with Starlink were submitted in cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, Phoenix, Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis and more.
Outages were also reported in Montreal and Toronto in Canada, and in other countries including Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, the Philippines and more, according to a map on DownDetector.
Tesla and SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk speaks at the SATELLITE Conference and Exhibition in Washington, Monday, March 9, 2020. Musk arrived in Indonesia’s resort island of Bali on Sunday, May 19, 2024, to… Tesla and SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk speaks at the SATELLITE Conference and Exhibition in Washington, Monday, March 9, 2020. Musk arrived in Indonesia’s resort island of Bali on Sunday, May 19, 2024, to launch Starlink satellite internet service in the world’s largest archipelago nation. Susan Walsh/AP
As of 3:09 p.m. ET, there were 3,400 reports of outages in the U.S., with the number ratcheting up to nearly 58,000 by 3:24 p.m. The outage reports started decreasing after 4 p.m., though service disruptions and blackouts were still being recorded on Down Detector.
Starlink confirmed the outage, saying in a message posted to its website: “Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage. Our team is investigating.”
The company posted a message to X, saying: “Starlink is currently in a network outage and we are actively implementing a solution. We appreciate your patience, we’ll share an update once this issue is resolved.”
Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, which operates Starlink, also wrote on X: “Service will be restored shortly. Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
What Is Starlink?
Starlink is a satellite internet service that was created by Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla who also served as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the Trump administration earlier this year.
Starlink aims to deliver global internet coverage. To use Starlink, users get a dish—often called “Dishy”—that connects to fast-moving satellites overhead, which relay internet traffic to ground stations linked to terrestrial networks.
This is a breaking news story. Updates to follow.
