The company has provided more details about what caused Thursday’s outage, which shut down Starlink access across the globe.
SpaceX is blaming a network upgrade for causing Thursday’s widespread Starlink outage, which temporarily shut down access to the satellite internet system.
The company has sent a message to resellers of Starlink services that sheds more light on what triggered the disruption. In the message, SpaceX attributed the error to an “upgrade procedure,” which involved rolling out software to Starlink’s “ground-based compute clusters,” according to an industry source.
The message didn’t elaborate on the upgrade and what it was designed for. But Starlink works by using orbiting satellites to relay data from ground-based antennas and facilities on Earth connected to fiber networks. The message explains that a rare mix of factors during the upgrade caused a disruption in Starlink’s core network by overloading the system while traffic was being distributed across the computing infrastructure.
