Starlink Stumbles: Hours-Long Outage Follows Launch of T-Mobile Satellite Service
Elon Musk’s satellite internet venture, Starlink, experienced a major network disruption on Thursday that lasted around two and a half hours, affecting users globally.
Outage tracking platform Downdetector recorded over 60,000 user reports at the height of the service interruption.
Owned and operated by SpaceX—also headed by Musk—Starlink acknowledged the issue on social media. Musk apologized at 4:30 p.m. ET via a post on X, formerly Twitter, stating that services would be restored soon. By 6:23 p.m. ET, Michael Nicolls, SpaceX’s VP of Starlink Engineering, reported that the network had mostly recovered. Two hours later, Starlink confirmed full restoration of service.
Coincidentally, the outage occurred the same day Musk shared that Starlink’s direct-to-smartphone service was expanding rapidly after T-Mobile’s satellite-powered “T-Satellite” connectivity became publicly available. T-Mobile clarified that its system remained unaffected during the incident, stating it operated as expected and was designed to connect phones in remote areas without cellular towers.
Despite Starlink’s growing popularity, a recent study indicated its performance may decline as more users come onboard. Meanwhile, Musk’s social platform X has faced several outages in recent months, prompting the tech billionaire to acknowledge the need for significant operational improvements.
