Starlink suffers rare global outage as software failure disrupts services worldwide

The service disruption, which began around 3:15PM ET (1900 GMT), affected residential, enterprise, and government users in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Connectivity data from NetBlocks showed a sharp drop to just 16% of normal traffic levels, with outage reports flooding social media and tracking platforms including Downdetector.

“Starlink has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours,” confirmed Michael Nicolls, Starlink’s VP of engineering. “The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.”

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk added on X: “Service will be restored shortly. Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

According to internal sources cited on Reddit, the disruption was triggered by a failed software update that temporarily “soft-bricked” portions of the satellite mesh network, causing a loss of inter-satellite and ground-station communication.

The outage comes just weeks after Starlink launched its Direct-to-Device (D2D) service in select markets, raising questions about the network’s resilience as its global footprint expands.

Impact: From Ukraine to enterprise users

In Ukraine, where Starlink has become a vital part of battlefield communications, the blackout disrupted frontline coordination. Ukrainian officials acknowledged the incident via Telegram, noting temporary loss of connectivity in several regions.

Elsewhere, the outage affected businesses and government services in rural and remote areas where Starlink is often the only available high-speed option.

Industries reliant on uninterrupted connectivity such as mining, maritime operations, and emergency services, experienced delays or communication breakdowns.

Beyond SOS: How D2D messaging is setting the scene for satellite broadband

Saf Malik

Deputy Editor