Elon Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink said it had a “network outage” on Thursday that lasted several hours.
There were more than 60,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector, a site that logs issues, during the peak of the outage..
Starlink is owned and operated by SpaceX, which is also run by Musk.
At 4:30 p.m. ET, Musk apologized for the outage on X and said, “Service will be restored shortly.”
At 6:23 p.m. ET, SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering, Michael Nicolls, said in an X post that service “has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours.”
About two hours after that post, Starlink wrote on X that service was fully restored.
Musk posted earlier Thursday that the company’s direct-to-cell-phone service was “growing fast” following the announcement that T-Mobile’s Starlink-powered satellite service was available to the public.
T-Mobile said the T-Satellite service was “operating normally with no network impacts or outages.” The service was built to keep phones connected “in places no carrier towers can reach,” according to the site. Starlink internet speeds and reliability decrease with popularity, a recent study found.
Musk’s social media site X, which he purchased as Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, has been hit with a number of outages in the past months.
The site had disruptions in early July. During another outage in May, Musk said that “major operational improvementsneed to be made.”
By CNBC
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