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Global Outage Lasting Over Two Hours
The disruption began last night around 9 PM French time. Reports quickly flooded in from across the globe. The website Downdetector recorded a surge of over 61,000 user reports coming from the United States, Europe, Africa, and Australia.
For about two and a half hours, a large portion of the over six million subscribers to the service found themselves without any internet connection. This is highly unusual for Starlink, known for its high reliability.
Caused by an “Internal Software Failure”
While some experts initially speculated about a potential cyberattack, Starlink’s management quickly clarified the situation. According to the Vice President of Engineering, the outage was due to a “failure of key internal software services that operate the main network.”
This was an internal bug, not an external attack. Elon Musk himself took to his network X to apologize: “Sorry about the outage. SpaceX will find the root cause to ensure this does not happen again.”
A Rare Slip for a Rapidly Expanding Service
This outage represents a significant test for Starlink, which has quickly become a major player in global telecommunications. The service is used not only by individuals in rural areas but also by military forces, such as those in Ukraine, and numerous critical industries such as maritime and air transport.
This hiccup comes as the company is in the midst of a significant expansion phase, having recently launched its “direct-to-cell” service that enables satellite-based SMS.
What’s the Takeaway?
This outage is a stark reminder that even the most advanced and decentralized technological systems, like a constellation of thousands of satellites, can have a single point of failure, often found in their control software.
It must be acknowledged that their crisis communication was quite effective. By being transparent about the cause (an internal bug) and issuing quick apologies at the highest level, they likely mitigated much of the user’s frustration.
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We’ve seen iCloud outages, managed by Apple with far less responsiveness in the past, and of course, issues with our telephone operators that were even more poorly managed from a communication standpoint. What about you, would an internet outage lasting more than two hours be a mere inconvenience or a disaster?
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