Starlink suffers global outage; interferes with radio astronomy

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service experienced a global outage earlier today, impacting around 200,000 users in Australia and 6 million globally. While incidents of this nature are rare for Starlink, the outage did have a disproportionate impact on customers in rural and remote areas who rely on the service due to a lack of traditional internet options.

Reports of Starlink internet issues first began coming through at around 5 am AEST, according to outage monitor Downdetector. Starlink acknowledged the issue in a post on X at 6.05 am, saying the company was “actively implementing a solution”. The company’s Vice President of Engineering, Michael Nicholls, shared at 8.23 am that Starlink had mostly recovered from the outage, with the company confirming full restoration at 10.18 am.

“The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,” Nicholls wrote. “We apologize 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.”

While the issue appears to be resolved for now, it comes just days after Curtin University researchers revealed that Starlink satellites are significantly interfering with radio astronomy observations, potentially impacting discovery and research. This is because unintended signals from satellites — leaked from onboard electronics — can drown out the faint radio waves astronomers use to study the universe.

Researchers from the Curtin node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), hosted at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy (CIRA), focused on the Starlink mega-constellation as it has the most satellites in orbit, at more than 7000 during the time of the study. The research team collected and analysed 76 million images of the sky using a prototype station for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope, with their results published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

PhD candidate and study lead Dylan Grigg said the team detected more than 112,000 radio emissions from 1806 Starlink satellites, making it the most comprehensive catalogue of satellite radio emissions at low frequencies to date.

“Starlink is the most immediate and frequent source of potential interference for radio astronomy: it launched 477 satellites during this study’s four-month data collection period alone,” Grigg said.

“In some datasets, we found up to 30% of our images showed interference from a Starlink satellite.”

Grigg said the issue wasn’t just the number of satellites, but the strength of the signals and the frequencies they were visible at.

“Some satellites were detected emitting in bands where no signals are supposed to be present at all, such as the 703 satellites we identified at 150.8 MHz, which is meant to be protected for radio astronomy,” he said.

“Because they may come from components like onboard electronics and they’re not part of an intentional signal, astronomers can’t easily predict them or filter them out.”

CIRA Executive Director and study co-author Professor Steven Tingay said there was scope for regulatory improvement to help avoid satellites interfering with research.

“Current International Telecommunication Union regulations focus on intentional transmissions and do not cover this type of unintended emission,” Tingay said.

“We hope this study adds support for international efforts to update policies that regulate the impact of this technology on radio astronomy research.”

Image credit: iStock.com/yucelyilmaz