American aerospace company SpaceX was founded in 2002. It is the first private company to have successfully launched as well as returned a spacecraft from Earth’s orbit. It was also the first to launch a crewed spacecraft which then docket at the International Space Station. During 2019 they started to launch satellites for their Starlink mega constellation. These satellites provide Internet service. Approximately 50 of these satellites are launched at a time.
That time in history when Starlink went down
SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network was back up and running on Friday as engineers hunted for the root cause of one of its biggest international outages the night before, a rare disruption for the powerful internet system set off by an internal software failure. Users in the U.S. and Europe began experiencing the outage at around 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT) Thursday, according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage tracker that said as many as 61,000 user reports to the site were made.
In Ukraine, where troops rely heavily on Starlink for battlefield communications, the outage affected combat operations as service was “down across the entire front,” said Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s drone forces. Starlink, active in roughly 140 countries and territories and used by a growing number of militaries and government agencies, is a key source of revenue for Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The network has grown rapidly since 2020 into a disruptive force in the satellite communications industry.
Driving future technologies with SpaceX
The overall satellite communication industry has also shown some rapid growth. This is mostly due to the technological innovations as well as the increasing need for some global connectivity. It also performs a vital role to enhance the communication infrastructure. Starlink acknowledged the outage on its X account Thursday and said,
“we are actively implementing a solution.”
The service mostly resumed after 2.5 hours, Michael Nicolls, SpaceX vice president of Starlink Engineering, wrote on X. By 8 p.m., the company wrote on X that the “network issue has been resolved, and Starlink service has been restored.” Musk also apologized: “Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” the SpaceX CEO wrote on X. The outage was a rare hiccup for SpaceX’s most commercially sensitive business.
Experts speculated whether the service, known for its resilience and speedy development, was beset by a glitch, a botched software update or perhaps a cyberattack. Doug Madory, an expert at the internet analysis firm Kentik, said such a sweeping global outage was unusual. Kentik is headquartered in San Francisco, California. There main point of business is network observability, network monitoring as well as anomaly detection.
Developments on a global platform
As Starlink amasses more than 6 million users, SpaceX has focused in recent months on updating its network to accommodate demands for higher speed and bandwidth. The company, in a partnership with T-Mobile TMUS.O, is also expanding the constellation with larger, more powerful satellites to offer direct-to-cell text messaging services, a line of business in which mobile phone users can send emergency text messages through the network in rural areas.
SpaceX has launched more than 8,000 Starlink satellites since 2020, building a uniquely distributed network in low-Earth orbit that has attracted intense demand from militaries, transportation industries and consumers in rural areas with poor access to traditional, fiber-based internet. It was unclear whether Thursday’s outage affected SpaceX’s other satellite-based services that rely on the Starlink network. Starshield, the company’s military satellite business unit, has billions of dollars’ worth of contracts with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.
In spite of this incident, Starlink still has big plans for the future. All of these are aimed at enhancing satellite internet services. The satellite constellation is set to expand to about 42,000 satellites. Approval is also currently being obtained to enable some gigabit-per-second broadband services. This in itself will greatly enhance the internet speed for all the users. Predictions also prevail about some new upcoming services and pricing models.
GCN.com/REUTERS.