Starlink network issue resolved, Elon Musk says 'sorry, won't happen again'

New Delhi, July 25 (IANS) After facing a global outage for nearly 3 hours, Starlink announced on Friday that the network issue affecting its internet service has been resolved.

On Thursday night, Starlink’s satellite internet service experienced an outage affecting many users worldwide. The issue affected customers across multiple continents, with outage tracking sites showing spikes in North America, Europe, and parts of Asia.

“The network issue has been resolved, and Starlink service has been restored. We understand how important connectivity is and apologize for the disruption,” Starlink, owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, shared in a post on the social media platform X.

Musk was also quick to comment on the incident.

"Service will be restored shortly. Sorry for the outage," said Musk on X.

"SpaceX will remedy the root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again," he added.

Michael Nicolls, VP of Starlink Engineering, noted that the outage, caused by the failure of key internal software, lasted for about 2.5 hours.

“Starlink has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours. The outage was due to the failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,” Nicolls shared on X.

“We apologise 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.

Starlink provides internet through a network of satellites orbiting Earth. The company currently operates the world’s largest constellation of satellites, with more than 6,750 in orbit.

Starlink services are already available in several countries, including Mongolia, Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Jordan, Yemen, Azerbaijan, and Sri Lanka.

Earlier this month, the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) approved Starlink for a period of five years in India.

With this, the final regulatory hurdle for the cheaper internet service to start rolling out its commercial satellite broadband operations in India has been cleared.

"It has granted authorisation to Starlink Satellite Communications Private Limited, New Delhi (SSCPL) for enabling provisioning of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation, namely Starlink Gen1," said IN-SPACe.

"The Starlink Gen1 Constellation is a global constellation with 4408 satellites orbiting Earth at altitudes varying between 540-570km, capable of providing about 600 Gbps throughput over India," it added.

The authorisation will enable SSCPL to provide satellite communication services in India.

--IANS

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