Global outage hits Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network

Elon Musk’s SpaceX was on Friday left scrambling to find a fix for a network outage of its Starlink satellite internet service.

The Starlink network links about 8000 satellites which beam broadband internet to millions of subscribers.

According to MobileCorp, there are about 200,000 subscribers in Australia. It has become a vital communications tool in remote parts of the country where major telcos such as Telstra and Optus struggle to service.

SpaceX, which also carries people and cargo to space using its Falcon family of rockets, didn’t say how widespread the outage was or how many subscribers had been affected.

“Starlink is currently in a network outage and we are actively implementing a solution. We appreciate your patience, we’ll share an update once this issue is resolved,” it said in a post on X early Friday morning.

Musk said in a subsequent post on X that “service will be restored shortly” and that Starlink will ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Starlink’s network began experiencing over 60,000 reported outages early Friday morning, according to Downdetector.

Two hours later, the issue was “mostly” fixed

“Starlink has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours,” the company posted at 8.23am AEST.

“The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.

“We apologise for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again.”

The space-based internet service has previously suffered outages, including in May 2024 and August 2021.

More than 140,000 people have joined a Starlink Users Australia Facebook group, and customers are getting checkerboard coverage across the country at 10am AEST. People in regional Tasmania are reporting their service is back up, as are people in most regions of Queensland and NSW.

However, people in Victoria’s Gippsland region and Queensland’s Whitsundays said they were offline.

“What would we all do if there was no internet in the world? With the Starlink global outage this morning it really makes you wonder,” a caravan blogger posted to the group.

“Would it change the way we live and work? Lucky its back on and we are connected with the universe again.”