SpaceX’s Global Starlink Broadband Service Suffers Big Outage UPDATE

Customer reports from across the world suggest that SpaceX’s new Starlink constellation of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) ultrafast broadband satellites has suffered a major service outage today, which appears to have started just after 1pm UK time and is affected users in the USA and Europe (possibly more).

At present SpaceX has launched over 1,740 LEOs into space (c.1,600 are fully active) – orbiting at an altitude of between 540 and 570 kilometres – and their initial ambition is to deploy a total of 4,425 by 2024, which could then be followed by as many as 12,000 at a later date (possibly late 2026). The service has already gone live in the USA, Canada, the UK and is now extending into other parts of the world, albeit in a pre-launch phase.

The beta phase of Starlink’s service does warn about the possibility of outages, although until now the vast majority of such issues have been related more to sporadic service coverage and issues with signal acquisition via placement of the dish / obstructions to its view of the sky, such as due to trees or buildings.

However, this particular outage appears to be affecting a large number of customers at the same time, across multiple countries – particularly the USA, England and Canada (this is just because that’s where most of their subscribers currently hail from). A post on Reddit charts the many complaints.

UPDATE 2:46pm

Customers are reporting that the service is now starting to return, after being down for up to around 1 hour for some people. Sadly, Starlink doesn’t have anything like a service status page and their media team never respond to hails, thus it’s currently difficult to find out what actually occurred.