SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service experienced a rare global outage on Thursday afternoon, marking its first major disruption of 2025.
The issue began around 3:15 PM ET, with users reporting connection failures and error messages such as “no healthy upstream.” Starlink acknowledged the problem in a post on X at 4:05 PM ET, confirming a network-wide outage and stating that engineers were working on a fix.
By 6:23 PM ET, Starlink’s VP of engineering, Michael Nicolls, announced that the network had “mostly recovered” after a roughly 2.5-hour disruption. According to Nicolls, the outage was caused by a failure in “key internal software services that operate the core network,” though no further technical details were provided.
The outage had serious implications in Ukraine, where military forces rely on Starlink terminals for frontline communications. The Kyiv Independent reported that the service went down for Ukrainian troops for approximately 150 minutes, the longest such disruption since the war began. The military later confirmed that connectivity had been restored.
The incident occurred just a day after T-Mobile launched its Starlink-powered T-Satellite messaging service, which allows messaging in remote areas. There has been no official word yet on whether the new service was affected. Meanwhile, NetBlocks reported that global Starlink connectivity dropped to just 16 percent of its normal levels during the outage, highlighting the scale of the disruption.
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