SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service experienced a significant outage on Thursday, lasting approximately two and a half hours. The disruption affected tens of thousands of users across its global network of roughly 140 countries and territories. Michael Nicolls, Starlink's vice president of Starlink Engineering, attributed the outage to a failure of key internal software services operating the core network. Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage tracker, reported as many as 61,000 user reports.

Both Nicolls and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk issued apologies for the disruption, promising to investigate the root cause and prevent future occurrences. The outage sparked speculation among experts regarding its cause, ranging from software glitches to potential cyberattacks. Starlink, boasting over six million users, has seen rapid growth and focused recently on network updates to improve speed and bandwidth.

Impact Statement: The outage highlights the potential vulnerabilities of even highly resilient satellite internet networks and underscores the importance of robust software infrastructure.