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The VP of Engineering at satellite broadband operator Starlink (SpaceX), Michael Nicolls, has revealed that last night’s 2.5 hour long network outage of their mega constellation – impacting all terminals (business and residential) – was caused by a “failure of key internal software services” in their core network.
The outage, which appears to have begun at just after 8pm last night (British Summer Time), is not the first such disruption that has hit Starlink during its life, but it was one of the biggest. The network-wide issue was then marked as being fully resolved just before 11pm (often it can take time for some terminals to come back, even after a core issue has been resolved). Starlink’s official website also experience a wobble during this period, which may have been caused by the surge of global interest.
According to Michael Nicolls (X): “Starlink has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours. The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network. We apologize for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again.”
At present Starlink has around 8,000 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (c.4,300 are v2 / V2 Mini) – mostly at altitudes of c.500-600km – and they’ll add thousands more by the end of 2027. Residential customers in the UK usually pay from £75 a month, plus £299 for hardware (currently free for most areas) on the ‘Standard’ unlimited data plan (kit price may vary due to different offers), which promises UK latency times of 28-36ms, downloads of 103-258Mbps and uploads of 15-26Mbps. Cheaper and more restrictive options also exist for roaming users.