{"id":43867,"date":"2025-07-26T22:07:28","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T14:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/starlink-kept-me-connected-to-the-internet-without-fail-until-thursday\/"},"modified":"2025-07-26T22:07:28","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T14:07:28","slug":"starlink-kept-me-connected-to-the-internet-without-fail-until-thursday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/starlink-kept-me-connected-to-the-internet-without-fail-until-thursday\/","title":{"rendered":"Starlink kept me connected to the Internet without fail\u2014until Thursday"},"content":{"rendered":"

A rare global interruption in the Starlink satellite Internet network knocked subscribers offline for more than two hours on Thursday, the longest widespread outage since SpaceX opened the service to consumers nearly five years ago.<\/p>\n

The outage affected civilian and military users, creating an inconvenience for many but cutting off a critical lifeline for those who rely on Starlink for military operations, health care, and other applications.<\/p>\n

Michael Nicolls, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of Starlink engineering, wrote on X that the network outage lasted approximately 2.5 hours.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,\u201d Nicolls wrote. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and CEO, apologized for the interruption in service on X: \u201cSorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn\u2019t happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Effects big and small<\/h2>\n

The Ukrainian military has been at the leading edge of adopting Starlink services and adapting the system for use in war zones. Ukraine\u2019s exploitation of Starlink connectivity has been instrumental in directing military operations, supporting battlefield communications, and controlling drones engaged in reconnaissance and offensive strikes.<\/p>\n

The commander of Ukraine\u2019s drone forces, Robert Brovdi, confirmed Thursday\u2019s Starlink outage reached his country\u2019s ongoing war with Russia.<\/p>\n

\u201cStarlink went down across the entire front,\u201d Brovdi wrote on Telegram. \u201cCombat operations were carried out without broadcasts; reconnaissance was carried out\u2026 using shock weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brovdi added that the interruption in service illustrates the importance of having multiple paths of connectivity, especially for time-critical military operations. \u201cThis incident, which lasted 150 minutes in the war, points to bottlenecks,\u201d he wrote, urging the military to diversify its means of communication and connectivity.<\/p>\n

Oleksandr Dmitriev, the founder of a Ukrainian system that centralizes feeds from thousands of drone crews across the frontline, told Reuters the outage was an example of the shortcomings of relying on cloud services for military operations, particularly battlefield drone reconnaissance.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

\u201cIf connection to the internet is lost \u2026 the ability to conduct combat operations is practically gone,\u201d Dmitriev told Reuters. He called for a heavier reliance on local communications networks that don\u2019t rely on the Internet. Ukraine launched a sophisticated drone attack on a Russian airbase last month but used Russian cell signals instead of satellite connectivity to control the strike drones.<\/p>\n

But Ukraine has made good use of Starlink. The country\u2019s government said earlier this year it had received more than 50,000 Starlink user terminals since Russia\u2019s invasion in 2022. Satellite broadband has the benefit of ubiquity. A Starlink antenna can be deployed anywhere with an open view of the sky and a power source and connect to the Internet. The satellites in low-Earth orbit beaming down Internet signals are not as vulnerable to physical attack as ground-based equipment for terrestrial networks.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The fastest Starlink download speeds achieved during a series of speed tests conducted during a one-hour period Friday.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n Stephen Clark\/Ars Technica<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

SpaceX recently surpassed 7,900 operational satellites in the Starlink constellation. More than 9,200 Starlink spacecraft have been launched since 2019, including satellites that SpaceX has already decommissioned and cleared from the constellation\u2019s operating altitude of roughly 340 miles (550 kilometers). These numbers make the Starlink fleet an order of magnitude larger than any other satellite constellation flying today.<\/p>\n

In an update earlier this month, SpaceX said it added 2.7 million active customers over the last year, bringing the total number of Starlink subscribers to more than 6 million.<\/p>\n

I am one of those subscribers. After moving to my family\u2019s ranch in rural Texas, I found no local service providers were able to offer the speed and reliability I needed to work as a full-time journalist. So, I took a gamble on Starlink a little more than a year ago. Until Thursday, our Starlink connection hadn\u2019t gone down for more than a couple of minutes, other than during a handful of power outages.<\/p>\n

With the network back up Friday, I checked Starlink\u2019s speeds. Over the course of an hour on Friday afternoon, my home connection averaged 210 Mbps down and 17.2 Mbps up, with an average latency of 23 milliseconds.<\/p>\n

This is anecdotal, sure, but the only other Internet option here is through a legacy copper telephone line or via geosynchronous satellites, known for longer latency and slower speeds than Starlink. Perhaps soon, Starlink will have some real competition in the direct-to-consumer satellite broadband market.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A rare global interruption in the Starlink satellite Internet network knocked subscribers offline for more than two hours on Thursday, the longest widespread outage since SpaceX opened the service to consumers nearly five years ago. The outage affected civilian and military users, creating an inconvenience for many but cutting off a critical lifeline for those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43868,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43867"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43867\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}