LOS ANGELES, July 24 (Xinhua) -- Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by U.S. private space company SpaceX, experienced a significant network outage on Thursday that has since been mostly resolved.
Users in the United States and Europe began reporting connectivity issues around 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time (1900 GMT), according to Downdetector, a platform that tracks service disruptions based on user reports.
Starlink acknowledged the issue in a post on X, stating that the network was down and that teams were actively working on a solution.
Around 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time (2230 GMT), Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink Engineering, said that the service had "mostly recovered" from the outage, which lasted about two and a half hours.
The outage was due to the failure of key internal software services that operate the core network, according to Nicolls.
"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 said in a post on X.
Starlink aims to provide high-speed broadband internet to areas where access has been unreliable, expensive or entirely unavailable, according to Elon Musk's SpaceX. ■