knocking tens of thousands of users offline, a rare disruption that prompted an apology from senior executives, including founder Elon Musk. Starlink, which has more than six million users across roughly 140 countries and territories, suffered the disruption on Thursday that lasted for about two hours and 30 minutes, according to Michael Nicolls, Starlink’s vice president of Starlink Engineering, in a post on X.

The outage was a rare hiccup for SpaceX’s most commercially sensitive business that had experts speculating whether the service, known for its resilience and rapid growth, was beset by a glitch, a botched software update or even a cyberattack. Users began experiencing the outage at about 3pm on the United States’ East Coast (19:00 GMT) last Thursday, according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage tracker that said as many as 61,000 user reports to the site were made.

“The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,” Nicolls explained in his post. “We apologise for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again,” he said.

Musk also apologised: “Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” the SpaceX CEO and founder wrote on X, which he also owns. 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, fibre-optic-based internet. Starlink has focused heavily in recent months on updating its network to accommodate demands for higher speed and bandwidth. (Al Jazeera/EPA)