On Tuesday evening, Starlink suffered a global outage, leaving customers scrambling to figure out what was happening. About an hour after the problem surfaced, customers started seeing their connections come back online. As of late Tuesday evening, the outage appears to be fixed. Starlink confirmed the issue on Twitter:
During the outage, many customers took to social media to vent their frustration. One popular Reddit comment asked, “How does a global network go down like that. They got a single server everything go through?” The Downdetector.com page for Starlink shows just how bad it was:
Not only was the internet service down for most Starlink customers around the world, the Starlink website was also failing to load. Because all technical support is handled through the Starlink website, customers were not able to reach out to Starlink for help.
Customer service remains one of the biggest problems with Starlink since the service launched several years ago. The Starlink subreddit on Reddit was filled with complaints about not being able to reach Starlink support when problems occur:
Just wanted to express how frustrating it is to be a starlink customer when there’s zero customer service or accountability. You’d think when their service goes down at the very least they’d tweet at us and let us know what’s going on, what the ETA is, or that they’re even aware of the problem.
– Salanan, Starlink subreddit on Reddit
This isn’t the first major outage on the Starlink network, but it appears to be the biggest one so far, affecting most of the nearly 2 million subscribers worldwide. There are no additional details about the cause of the issue, but I will update this post as more information becomes available.