Musk's Starlink service is back online after a short outage that impacted thousands of users

Elon Musk’s Starlink, a satellite internet service operated by his SpaceX company, has been restored after encountering a global outage on Monday, September 15, according to the tracking website Downdetector.com.

The online service monitor reported that the total number of users who encountered the problem was more than 43,000; however, by 1:15 a.m. (0515 GMT), the platform revealed that fewer than 1,000 US-based users were still experiencing the problem.

Starlink’s website reported the outage in a statement, stating, “Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage. Our team is investigating,”  without giving many details. This message was later deleted.

To effectively monitor outages, Downdetector collects status updates from different sources.

Starlink encounters a global service outage affecting several operations 

Robert Brovdi,  a Ukrainian soldier who founded the Ukrainian military drone unit “Madyar’s Birds,” commented on the situation. According to him, the Starlink outage significantly impacted the whole front line of the war with Russia beginning at 07:28 local time (0428 GMT). 

These remarks were made after Brovdi shared a Telegram post stating, “another global outage at SpaceX.” He then added that the services were restored after thirty minutes.

Concerning the service outage impacts on Ukraine’s military, it is worth noting that the military group depends heavily on SpaceX’s Starlink terminals to communicate in battles and run some drone activities effectively. To support this claim, reliable sources reveal that over SpaceX’s Starlink 50,000 terminals are actively used in the country today.

This is because the terminals demonstrated the ability to withstand spying and signal interference during the three and a half years Ukraine has been in a battle against Russia’s invasion.

In the meantime, Starlink is popularly adopted in remote and conflict areas. It offers internet services via a network of low-Earth orbit satellites.

Brovdi calls for the need to adopt several communication and connectivity methods

This was not the first service outage encountered on Starlink. As reported by Cryptopolitan just a few weeks ago, the satellite internet service had also crashed. Users across the globe said their connections just dropped out, and there was no warning.

Starlink also had a major blackout in July, dragging on for hours. Brovdi reported that the internet provider used by the Ukrainian military group was ineffective for two and a half hours overnight. SpaceX VP of Starlink Engineering Michael Nicolls said it happened because of a “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.” No updates were shared this time, at least not by press time.

This report was made after Starlink faced one of its major global outages due to an internal software defect, which disconnected tens of thousands of users from effectively accessing its services.

In this scenario, Ukraine’s senior commander shared a 10:41 p.m. (1941 GMT) telegram post stating that Starlink was offline across the entire front.

Like the other service outage, the company shared an X post acknowledging that the services provider encountered a global outage and assured its users that they were actively enacting a suitable solution. Starlink has over 6 million users located in approximately 140 countries and territories.

Just as they had promised, by around 1:05 a.m. the following day, Brovdi shared another telegram post stating that the problem had been fixed. Concerning the incident, he called attention to the risks associated with relying heavily on these systems and urged individuals to look for other effective communication and connectivity methods.

Based on the commander’s explanation, combat missions were conducted without a video feed, and they highly depended on strike drones for battlefield reconnaissance.

Apart from Brovdi, a Ukrainian drone commander who wished to remain anonymous due to the confidential nature of the situation, also confirmed the incident, acknowledging that his unit had to postpone several combat operations due to the global outage.

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