Reuters reported that Starlink, the satellite internet service of SpaceX, the space company led by Elon Musk, experienced an outage on the 15th (local time).
Starlink said in a notice on its website that "a service outage is currently occurring and we are investigating the cause." However, it did not disclose details on the specific cause of the outage or the regions affected.
According to DownDetector, a U.S. website that tracks internet service outages, more than 43,000 users had reported service disruptions as of 12:35 a.m. Eastern time. SpaceX did not provide a separate response to Reuters' request for comment.
Starlink has recently experienced repeated outages. On the 18th of last month, service was halted for about an hour, and more than 30,000 user reports were filed. On Jul. 24, the outage lasted more than two hours, and at the time Michael Nichols, vice president of the Starlink division, said it was due to "a problem with a key internal software service that operates the core network."
Starlink, which began beta service in Oct. 2020, has rapidly grown its subscriber base using a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite network. It now provides internet service to more than 5 million individuals and corporations worldwide and operates its network with more than about 7,000 communications satellites.
The latest outage once again exposed reliability issues in the rapidly growing satellite internet sector, and securing reliability amid global customer expansion is emerging as a key task for Starlink.