SpaceX probes cause of Starlink’s global satellite network outage

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network was back up and running on Friday as engineers hunted for the root cause of one of its biggest international outages the night before, a rare disruption for the powerful internet system set off by an internal software failure.

- Reuters

Users in the US and Europe began experiencing the outage at around 3 pm EDT (local time) on Thursday, according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage tracker that said as many as 61,000 user reports to the site were made.

In Ukraine, where troops rely heavily on Starlink for battlefield communications, the outage affected combat operations as service was “down across the entire front,” said Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine's drone forces.

Starlink, active in roughly 140 countries and territories and used by a growing number of militaries and government agencies, is a key source of revenue for Elon Musk’s SpaceX.