Starlink suffered a rare global outage on Thursday, knocking out internet connectivity for a chunk of its 6 million customers in more than 120 countries and territories.
The outage began at around 4 p.m. ET and continued for about three hours.
As Starlink engineers set to work on identifying and fixing the problem, SpaceX chief Elon Musk posted on X: “Service will be restored shortly. Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
At around 7 p.m., Starlink said in a post on X that the service had “mostly recovered” from the outage, and put it down to a “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.” In other words, an important piece of software conked out.
Starlink added: “We apologize 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.”
As with any massive tech outage, the online crowd (well, those who could get online, that is) leaped into action, posting numerous memes about the satellite-based slip-up. Here are some of the best:
“Elon musk right now to his staff members of Starlink.”
“Starlink outage has me staring at the sky like it’s gonna apologize.”
“My life without Starlink connection.”
“What terrible service today.”
“Starlink headquarters.”
“Me awkwardly logging into twitter after months just to come and confirm if Starlink is down for anyone else.”
“Current mood since Starlink is down.”
“Hey, Starlink — have you tried this one yet?”
“First widespread Starlink outage I’ve seen. Someone is having a bad day.”
“Starlink is down worldwide … Sucks to live in the mountain off-grid …
Starlink do something.”
“The Starlink outage basically has people go out touching grass. Right?”
