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SpaceX’s Starlink<\/a> suffered a major outage on Thursday, affecting tens of thousands of users globally. The Starlink outage was caused by an internal software failure, according to the company. Users across the U.S. and Europe reported connectivity issues around 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT), as per Downdetector<\/a>, which recorded up to 61,000 user reports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Starlink, which serves over 6 million users in nearly 140 countries and territories, acknowledged the problem on its official X account. The company announced that it was actively working on a solution. Service was mostly restored after 2.5 hours, Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink Engineering, revealed on X.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,\u201d Nicolls wrote, apologizing for the disruption and confirming efforts to find the root cause. Elon Musk also apologized, stating, \u201cSorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn\u2019t happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Experts commented on the incident, noting the unusual scale of the Starlink outage. Doug Madory, an analyst at internet monitoring firm Kentik, reported that the outage was global. \u201cThis is likely the longest outage ever for Starlink, at least while it became a major service provider,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The outage has sparked discussions about possible causes, including a software glitch, a failed update, or even a cyberattack. Gregory Falco, director of a space and cybersecurity lab at Cornell University<\/a>, speculated, \u201cI\u2019d guess this is a bad software update, not entirely dissimilar to the CrowdStrike issue with Windows last year, or a cyberattack.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Key details include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Starlink\u2019s growing user base has pushed SpaceX to focus on enhancing network speed and bandwidth. The company\u2019s Starshield unit, which handles military satellite services, holds significant contracts with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies. It remains unclear if these services were affected by the Starlink outage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n