Starlink, the outage and satellite internet service
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Starlink, owned by Elon Musk, has changed the game in terms of internet accessibility in rural and other underserved areas lacking high-speed broadband infrastructure. It has 2 million US subscribers, and more than 6 million globally.
Starlink appears to have largely recovered from a widespread outage on Thursday afternoon that affected its services across the United States and other parts of the world. Reports of service disruptions flooded outage tracker Down Detector earlier in the afternoon, with users experiencing internet outages and, in some cases, total blackouts.
The website Down Detector recorded a spike in Starlink user error reports beginning around 3 p.m., with error reports peaking around 3:30 p.m. As of this writing, the number of reports had dropped, but they were still significantly higher than the hours prior to the incident.
Tens of thousands of people across the world reported issues with Starlink on Thursday, according to Downdetector. Starlink confirmed it was experiencing a network outage and said it has "mostly recovered from the network outage."