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By Sonam Sheth
Evening Politics Editor
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Starlink appears to have largely recovered from a widespread outage on Thursday afternoon that affected its services across the United States and other parts of the world. Reports of service disruptions flooded outage tracker Down Detector earlier in the afternoon, with users experiencing internet outages and, in some cases, total blackouts.
Starlink and its founder, Elon Musk, confirmed the outage and said they were investigating the issue.
As of 6:23 p.m. ET, a senior Starlink engineer announced the company had "mostly recovered" from the outage.
Read More on U.S.
Starlink Outage: Where Issues Were Reported
According to DownDetector, problem reports with Starlink were submitted in cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, Phoenix, Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis and more.
Outages were also reported in Montreal and Toronto, Canada, as well as in other countries, including Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, the Philippines, and more.
As of 3:09 p.m. ET, there were 3,400 reports of outages in the U.S., with the number ratcheting up to nearly 58,000 by 3:24 p.m. Cisco's ThousandEyes intelligence team told Newsweek that it detected the outage began around 3:15 p.m. and was still ongoing as of 5:45 p.m.
The outage reports on Down Detector had started decreasing after 4 p.m. but hadn't subsided entirely, with service disruptions and blackouts still being recorded on the website.
As of 5:54 p.m. ET, 56 percent of Starlink users were reporting internet issues, while 43 percent were reporting total blackouts.
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Reports of an outage were also posted to Reddit earlier in the afternoon, with one user joking: "Sorry everyone, I was telling someone just an hour ago that Starlink was wonderfully reliable for me so this is clearly my fault."
"it's worldwide," wrote another user.
Starlink confirmed the outage, saying in a message posted to its website: "Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage. Our team is investigating."
The company posted a message to X at 4:05 p.m., saying: "Starlink is currently in a network outage and we are actively implementing a solution. We appreciate your patience, we'll share an update once this issue is resolved."
Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, which operates Starlink, also wrote on X: "Service will be restored shortly. Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn't happen again."
What Caused Starlink's Outage?
Michael Nicolls, the VP of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, wrote on X that the outage lasted roughly 2.5 hours and was "due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network."
"We apologize 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 added.
The global network and security company CloudFare posted its own update at 5:41 p.m., saying on X that it appeared the Starlink outage had been resolved. At the time, Starlink's website still had a message posted to its homepage saying it was experiencing an outage that it was working to resolve.
What Is Starlink?
Starlink is a satellite internet service that was created by Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, who also served as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the Trump administration.
Starlink aims to deliver global internet coverage. To use Starlink, users receive a dish—often referred to as "Dishy"—that connects to fast-moving satellites overhead, which relay internet traffic to ground stations linked to terrestrial networks.
Thursday's outage came one day after T-Mobile debuted a Starlink-powered satellite service called T-Satellite.
Musk also touted Starlink's direct-to-cell phone service earlier in the day, writing on X that it was "growing fast." A T-Mobile spokesperson told Newsweek the T-Satellite service was operating normally throughout the day.
Update 7/24/25, 5:01 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
Update 7/24/25, 5:56 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
Update 7/24/25, 6:23 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
Update 7/24/25, 7:22 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
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