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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

#71

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?

I mean, why do systems go down at all? a lot of big outages are simple misconfiguration or cascading failure from what seemed like small changes. It's rarely due to the physical constraints of the world

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#74

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?

The fleet of satellites is still managed centrally, even if the physical infrastructure is distributed globally to be able to see satellites in different hemispheres, at some point they are very likely managing these from a single control plane

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#75

So, if (just spitballing here) Russia were to have wanted to take out Starlink in order to handicap Ukrainian operations, and they didn't want to do something as visible as actually taking out the satellites, what would be the most likely way for them to have done it? And how would we be able to check if that's what happened? No idea if this is plausible at all, just raising the question for anyone who knows more abo…

It's essentially impossible for anyone to disable the Starlink network by "taking out satellites" through physical means. There aren't enough anti satellite missiles in the world to make a dent, it would cost trillions to manufacture enough, and SpaceX can launch satellites faster than anyone could manufacture interceptors anyway. And Kessler syndrome is impossible at the altitudes Starlink uses.

Cyberattack is the only plausible way to take down Starlink.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#77

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 g…

it's pretty amazing the amount of damage a BGP oopsie can do. Also, you can fit pretty much all the BGP admins for the entire Internet in one large room.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#78

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?

Cyberattack. Given the usage in active wars, it's a big juicy target. There's precedent too; Russia hacked Viasat at the start of the Ukraine war. They actually bricked user terminals in that attack.

FYI, Vodafone and other major European mobile networks were down during the last few days.

This is hybrid warfare, not a coincidence.

Russia needs to learn some manners, the hard way.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#79

So, if (just spitballing here) Russia were to have wanted to take out Starlink in order to handicap Ukrainian operations, and they didn't want to do something as visible as actually taking out the satellites, what would be the most likely way for them to have done it? And how would we be able to check if that's what happened? No idea if this is plausible at all, just raising the question for anyone who knows more abo…

If they had that capability, they could presumably do it any time, and then Starlink would recover at some point.

So it would make sense to combine this with some other offensive action where hampering communication would help them. Otherwise they are just poking at something just to do it... unless this were a more serious attack with long-term consequences.

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