Musk’s Starlink Faces Extended Outage Following T-Mobile Satellite Service Launch

On Thursday, Elon Musk’s satellite internet service, Starlink, experienced a confirmed network outage. The company acknowledged the issue and is actively working to resolve it.

Reports of the outage exceeded 60,000 on Downdetector, a platform that tracks service disruptions. Starlink, a subsidiary of SpaceX, is also managed by Musk.

By 4:30 p.m. ET, Musk took to social media platform X to apologize for the inconvenience, stating that service restoration was underway and would occur shortly.

Following his announcement, at 6:23 p.m. ET, Michael Nicolls, SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering, updated users via an X post, indicating that the service had mostly recovered from the outage that lasted about 2.5 hours.

Approximately two hours later, Starlink confirmed on X that service was fully restored. Earlier on Thursday, Musk highlighted the rapid growth of the company’s direct-to-cell-phone service, following T-Mobile’s announcement of its Starlink-powered satellite service becoming publicly available.

T-Mobile’s new T-Satellite service aims to keep users connected in areas lacking cellular tower coverage. Starlink has not yet provided a detailed comment regarding the outage.

A recent study suggests that Starlink’s internet speeds and reliability may suffer during periods of high demand, though it remains unclear whether the T-Satellite service was impacted by the outage. Musk’s social media platform X, previously known as Twitter, has faced several outages in recent months.

Notably, disruptions were reported earlier in July, and during a separate incident in May, Musk acknowledged the necessity for significant operational improvements to enhance the platform’s reliability.