Elon Musk’s Starlink was down for hours last night following a global outage – and users vented their fury, demanding refunds for the satellite internet service
Elon Musk has addressed the worldwide blackout his satellite internet Starlink has suffered.
Tens of thousands of users reported issues with Starlink at the peak of the outage last night. Reports of issues began to surge around 8pm in the UK (12pm Californian time), soon after which the company said it was “actively” trying to solve the problem.
But the difficulties persisted for several hours until around 12.15am on Friday UK time. Users relying on Starlink because they “live in the sticks” were left stranded with no connection.
Mr Musk posted on X soon after, though, to apologise for the impact the outage had caused. The billionaire said: “Service will be restored shortly. Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.” Mr Musk’s firm SpaceX manufactures the satellites, which were launched in 2019. The post was liked more than 55,000 times on X.
Starlink aims to provide high-speed, low-latency internet so when the tool suffered the outage on Thursday, users were angry. One posted online: “You guys gonna reimburse us for this massive outage that’s got me kicked out of work?” Another fumed: “I couldn’t attend a meeting, now I’m in serious trouble. You owe us a refund.”
Those who had reported difficulties included more than 10,000 people in the UK. However, the largest impact was felt in the US where users were unable to work as a result on Thursday afternoon.
Yet, some Mr Musk fans have rushed to defend the service – despite it then being down globally for almost four hours. One said: “My spectrum internet goes out once or more a week. This is the first time in a year starlink has been down. Stop complaining about a refund for 1 hour or whatever it will be lol. You really going to complain about 1 hour or $0.17 of service?”
Another added: “Starlink, huge company. Brief outage & the owner & CEO immediately apologizes for the interruption and reports to the public that service will soon be restored. Wow!! Never seen Comcast, ATT, Verizon, etc have such incredible customer service, let alone from ownership. Elon rocks!”
A third said: “It is wild people are complaining about #Starlink going down for the first ever. We get internet through the air from machines flying through space. We all could use some gratitude and perspective.”
The mayhem came after EE and BT experienced major issues on Thursday, with thousands of people across the country unable to make or receive calls for some time. It is understood that the issues impacted people on other networks, including Vodafone as they tried and communicate with users on EE and BT.