Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet has suffered one of its largest international outages on Thursday, knocking tens of thousands of users offline and causing a rare disruption that prompted an apology from senior executives, including founder Elon Musk, reports Al Jazeera.
Michael Nicolls, Starlink's Vice President of Engineering, stated in a post on X that Thursday's disruption lasted approximately two hours and 30 minutes.
SpaceX's Starlink, known for its resilience and rapid growth, has more than six million users across roughly 140 countries and territories affected by the outage.
The outage was a rare setback for SpaceX's most commercially sensitive business that prompted experts to speculate whether the service was affected by a glitch, a botched software update or even a cyberattack.
"The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network," Nicolls explained in his post.
"We apologise 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," he said.
Musk also apologised, "Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy the root cause to ensure it doesn't happen again," the SpaceX CEO and founder wrote on X, which he also owns.
Since 2020, SpaceX has launched more than 8,000 Starlink satellites, creating a uniquely distributed network in low-Earth orbit that has become highly sought after by transportation industries, militaries, and has formed an alternative for consumers in rural areas with poor access to traditional, fibre-optic-based internet.
In recent months, Starlink has prioritised updating its network to accommodate rising demands for higher speed and bandwidth.
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