Starlink outage: Elon Musk satellite internet down again

Starlink, the satellite internet service provider by SpaceX, experienced a brief network outage in the United States on Monday, August 18, 2025.

Downdetector, a service that tracks network issues, registered over 43,000 complaints. The reports decreased to 2800 when the internet service was restored.

The epicentre of this outage was the U.S., but there were reports of disruptions in other parts of the world, including the United Kingdom, South America, Australia and Ukraine.

Some of the users expressed their frustration on X, “I couldn’t attend a meeting, now I’m in serious trouble. You owe us a refund.”

Another user posted, “You guys are gonna reimburse us for this massive outage that’s got me kicked out of work.”

The company did not respond immediately. The Starlink network outage was the second within two weeks.

A Starlink network outage occurred before on July 24, when tens of thousands of users were left without internet worldwide. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, gave an apology statement on X:

“Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy the root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

Michael Nicolls, Starlink VP of Engineering at SpaceX, said that the global outage that happened last time was a “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.”

Starlink, a satellite-based service, provides internet to 6 million people across 140 countries. SpaceX has launched more than 8000 satellites since 2020.

SpaceX, in partnership with the U.S. Space Force, has a proposal to increase the number of launches from Vandenberg from 50 to up to 100 annually.

What is causing the Starlink outage?

According to an official statement, the main problem behind the outage was “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.”