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Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

starlink.com

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Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#42

Post by ben_w »

Rooster61 wrote: post #19

Curious as to what could cause a global outage like that. The system consists of birds in the air and individual ground stations. There's no big choke point that I'm aware of that could cause the whole shebang to go dark. Am I missing something here?

There is a non-zero probability that Musk personally tried to use Grok to make and roll out a software update.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#43

Post by woutifier »

indigodaddy wrote: post #17
woutifier wrote: post #3

A service outage meaning starlink is down globally. Anecdotally my starlink is using more power currently than usual. And when I first looked at the app it mentioned having gotten a new public IP address.

I get new public IPs fairly frequently (maybe once every two weeks or so?)

Indeed but in this case it coincided with starlink going down. Could be a coincidence though!

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#44

Post by riscy »

nsxwolf wrote: post #12
RIMR wrote: post #9

[flagged]

What's the failure mode that would lead to an unrecoverable loss of such a large mesh network?

Any failure that causes a loss of control or communication with the satellites, especially as a result of attack or software update rolled out to many of them that contains a latent bug.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#46

Post by piker »

abrahms wrote: post #40

Interestingly, this webpage doesn't load due to "no healthy upstream" and there's no status.starlink.com . That's.. quite the outage! Interested to hear what went wrong.

Probably their web servers are getting hugged to death by all of their worldwide users grabbing the phone to check who to call.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#48

Post by 0xffff2 »

markasoftware wrote: post #25
nsxwolf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the failure mode that would lead to an unrecoverable loss of such a large mesh network?

if you could somehow put something into persistent storage on the satellites that causes it to crash every time it tries to start up before it gets to the point where it's able to update the software, then they'd be bricked. see also: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/02/radio-station-snafu-in-...

I don't know how Starlink's satellites are architected, but the spacecraft I am familiar with has several different boot images with automatic failover. For that system, you would have to replace/corrupt multiple of the actual boot images to brick the system completely.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#50

Post by dave_universetf »

Rooster61 wrote: post #19

Curious as to what could cause a global outage like that. The system consists of birds in the air and individual ground stations. There's no big choke point that I'm aware of that could cause the whole shebang to go dark. Am I missing something here?

BGP is the canonical way to take your entire global network offline within seconds. Glancing at BGP looking glasses, Starlink's prefixes seem to still be announced, but there could still be an accidental blackhole or routing loop within their AS, or something broken in one of their transit providers.

No idea if that's what's going on, but routing protocols are one of a few effectively global control planes that can go wrong very quickly like this.

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