After a massive Starlink satellite internet outage on July 25, some users began to notice a significant increase in connection speeds. Meanwhile, SpaceX, without making any official statements, accidentally revealed the real cause of the incident when notifying resellers.
After a massive Starlink satellite internet outage on July 25, some users began to notice a significant increase in connection speeds. Meanwhile, SpaceX, without making any official statements, accidentally revealed the real cause of the incident when notifying resellers.
As PCMag reports, the company admitted in an internal letter that the outage was caused by a software update for its Starlink ground computing clusters. During the upgrade procedure, a combination of factors occurred that overloaded the system, leading to a disruption in the core network.
Meanwhile, some Starlink users have reported significant performance improvements since the incident. One user wrote on Reddit:
«I usually get 110-150Mbps, but today I’m getting 200-250Mbps, with peaks up to 346+Mbps.»
SpaceX previously attributed the failure to an abstract «internal service failure,» but new information suggests it was an infrastructure upgrade that went wrong. The company has not officially released any technical report on the cause.
This outage has already become the longest in Starlink history. Over 2.5 hours of complete outage for millions of users in the US, Canada, Europe and other regions. The service is currently used by over 6 million customers worldwide, including the Ukrainian military and critical infrastructure.
Interestingly, unlike previous incidents, SpaceX did not issue any public press releases this time. It is likely that the company did not plan to disclose the cause of the failure until the information was «leaked» through a communication channel with partners.
Some technical experts suggest that the speed increase is not simply a result of system stabilization, but rather the hidden deployment of a new generation of ground infrastructure that can better handle peak loads and route traffic more efficiently. Such actions may be related to preparations for the next phase of the Starlink Direct to Cell network deployment, which will allow the Internet to be transmitted directly to smartphones without the need for a terminal.
We previously wrote about how Reuters reported on a previously unknown order from billionaire Elon Musk to SpaceX engineers to disable the Ukrainian military’s Starlink satellite internet. It slowed down the liberation of occupied territories in 2022 and prevented the encirclement of Russians in the city of Beryslav in the Kherson region.
