Image: Starlink
SpaceX has confirmed that last week’s widespread Starlink outage — its longest on record — was caused by an internal network upgrade gone wrong (via PCMag).
The global outage, which hit around noon PT on Thursday, temporarily knocked millions of Starlink users offline, including customers across North America and as far as Ukraine. While SpaceX initially cited a “failure of key internal software services,” a message sent to Starlink resellers later clarified the disruption stemmed from a software “upgrade procedure” targeting the service’s ground-based compute clusters.
According to an industry source familiar with the communication, a rare combination of events during the upgrade caused the system to overload while redistributing traffic across its computing infrastructure — triggering the widespread downtime.
Although most users were back online within approximately 2.5 hours, some continued experiencing connectivity issues into the next day and over the weekend. This marks the longest and most disruptive outage in Starlink’s history.
Starlink currently serves more than 6 million customers globally, including over 2 million in the U.S. and 500,000 in Canada. The service has become especially critical in rural and remote areas, as well as in war-affected regions like Ukraine.
Interestingly, some Starlink users have reported faster speeds since the outage. “I usually average around 110–150 Mbps, but today I’m getting 200–250 Mbps. Seeing highs of 346+ Mbps,” said one Reddit user, fueling speculation that the outage was tied to a performance-enhancing upgrade.
Meanwhile, others noted their service has been spotty or sluggish ever since. For any users still experiencing connectivity issues, Starlink’s support page now recommends power cycling and rebooting all Starlink and third-party equipment.
SpaceX exec Michael Nicolls previously apologized for the outage, adding: “We are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again.”
