Washington: Tens of thousands of people around the world lost the Internet connection Thursday after the Starlink service of Elon Musk suddenly dropped.
The power failure, which lasted more than two hours, was caused by a problem in the internal software of the system, a rare disturbance for the powerful satellite internet system of Elon Musk.
Starlink apologized and said it worked to make sure it would not happen again.
In the United States and Europe, users began to undergo the breakdown around 3 p.m. from the HA (1900 GMT), according to Downdetector, a crowd failure tracker that said up to 61,000 user reports on the site.
Starlink, which has more than 6 million users in around 140 countries and territories, then recognized the failure on its X account and said: “We actively implement a solution.”
The Starlink service mainly resumed after 2.5 hours, Michael Nicolls, Vice-President of Starlink engineering, wrote on X.
“The breakdown was due to the failure of the main internal software services that exploit the central network,” said Nicolls, apologizing for the disruption and promising to find its deep cause.
Musk also apologized: “Sorry for the breakdown. SpaceX will remedy Root Cause to make sure that this will not happen again,” wrote the CEO of SpaceX on X.
The breakdown was a rare hiccup for the most sensitive activities in SpaceX and had speculating experts if the service – known for its resilience and its rapid growth – was struck by a problem, an sloppy software update or even a cyber attack.
Doug Madory, an expert from the Internet analysis company, Kentik, said that the breakdown was global and that such interruption of sweeping was unusual.
“It is probably the longest Starlink breakdown, at least when it has become a major service provider,” said Madory.
As Starlink has won more users, SpaceX has focused heavily in recent months on updating its network to meet the higher speed and bandwidth demand.
The company, in partnership with T -Mobile, also expands the constellation with larger and more powerful satellites to provide Direct Text Mail Services to cells – allowing mobile phones to send emergency texts via the network in rural areas.
SpaceX has launched more than 8,000 Starlink satellites since 2020, building a network distributed only in low orbit which attracted high demand from soldiers, transport and consumers industries in rural areas with poor fiber -based internet access.
“I would speculate that this is a bad software update, not entirely different from the Crowdsstrike waste with Windows last year, or a cyber attack,” said Gregory Falco, director of a space and cybersecurity laboratory at Cornell University.
An update of the widely used cybersecurity software from Crowdsstrike has led to global flight cancellations and to industries affected worldwide in July from last year. The breakdown disrupted Internet services, which concerns 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices.
It was not clear if Thursday’s breakdown affected the other Satellite services of SpaceX which are based on the Starlink network. Starsfield, the company’s military satellite unit, has billions of dollars in contracts with Pentagon and the United States intelligence agencies.
