Starlink global outage on July 24, 2025 lasts about 2.5 hours

What changed

On Thursday, July 24, 2025, Starlink went down for customers across the US and in many other countries. Light Reading reported that the outage lasted about two and a half hours. User reports on Downdetector peaked around 4 p.m. ET.

Starlink’s VP of engineering, Michael Nicolls, said the outage was due to the “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk apologized and said SpaceX would fix the root cause so it would not happen again.

This was not a satellite failure, a weather event or a dish problem. It was the ground software that runs the network.

When

• Start: around 3 p.m. ET on July 24, 2025.
• Duration: about 2.5 hours, so service came back for most users around 5:30 p.m. ET.

Who is affected and what it means for you

Every Starlink customer was in the outage area, whatever the plan, dish model or sky view. For remote workers on the East Coast, it took out the last part of the work day. For the Central, Mountain and Pacific time zones, it landed squarely in the afternoon.

The lesson is about backup design, not about Starlink being unreliable in general. A core network failure is the one kind of outage no setting can fix. Restarting the dish, moving it, or switching plans would not have helped. Only a second connection on a different network would have kept a call going: a cellular router or hotspot, a fixed wireless line, or a DSL or cable line if one exists.

Starlink’s business plans include a service level agreement. Starlink’s support pages, as we last checked them, say Local and Global Priority guarantee 99.9% network availability per billing month and credit 20% of the base cost if that is missed. An SLA credit pays a little money back; it does not keep you online.

What you can do now

1. Build or check your backup line with the Failover Builder. It asks five questions and suggests a primary line, a backup on a different network, a dual-WAN router and a UPS.
2. Test the switch before you need it. Unplug the dish during a quiet hour and see whether your router fails over and your VPN reconnects.
3. For offices, our office backup line guide compares satellite and cellular as the standby.
4. Decide in advance what work moves to the phone during a long outage: calls, chat, two-factor codes.
5. If you’re deciding whether Starlink can be your only line, our remote work verdict covers who shouldn’t rely on it without a backup.

What stays the same

• Starlink’s plans, prices and policies did not change because of the outage.
• Our advice was the same before and after: anyone whose pay depends on calls should have a backup line on a different network.

What we don’t know yet

• Starlink has not published a detailed post-mortem in a place we could find and cite. We know the cause only from the short statement above.
• We don’t know how many customers were affected. Downdetector counts are user reports, not a customer count.
• Our own logger had not started, so we have no minute-by-minute view of this outage.

This item is background: it happened more than 90 days before we published this page.

Source

Software failure triggers nationwide Starlink outage (Light Reading)

Source date Jul 25, 2025. Retrieved Oct 6, 2026.

Related guides on this site

• Failover Builder: plan a backup internet line Five questions in; a primary line, backup line, dual-WAN router and UPS out, with dated prices and what it won’t cover.
• Starlink as the backup line for an office Satellite vs cellular as the standby for a wired office, the failover router, and the monthly cost.
• Is Starlink good for working from home? The honest verdict by work type, who shouldn’t rely on it, and the decision against fiber, cable and fixed wireless.

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