SpaceX's Starlink suffered a rare global outage last night, according to users.
At around 3 a.m. EST, subscribers of the satellite internet service took to Reddit to report the disruption, which affected users in various locations including California, New York, Texas, the UK, and New Zealand.
For some, the outage lasted for about three hours. During that time, affected users reported receiving degraded service and intermittent access to the satellite internet service.
“Back on. Back off. Back on. Back off,” wrote one user on Reddit. Others posted images showing Starlink struggling to search for a signal throughout the night.
We reached out to SpaceX and will update the story if we hear back. In the meantime, Starlink’s support team told one user: “We have just been alerted that there is known network issue in your area. Our engineers are working diligently to resolve these issues.”
Often times, internet outages are caused by a network misconfiguration or a software update that goes wrong. So it’s possible Starlink experienced the same problem. The service currently has nearly 3,000 satellites in orbit, which beam broadband to residences on the ground. SpaceX is routinely rolling out updates to the system in an effort to improve speeds and security.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has also warned that the Russian government has been trying to jam and hack Starlink, which has been supplying high-speed broadband to wartorn areas of Ukraine. Globally, Starlink has around 500,000 subscribers.