Live data from Hacker News

Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

starlink.com

111–120 of 305 posts

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#112

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?

My money is on a misconfigured switch or hub that allowed a broadcast storm that shut down all of their edge devices!

Additional points for a user to cause the loop by plugging an rj-45 where they weren't supposed to, despite no warning or label telling them not to!

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#113
post #10

Well my boss is in a cabin in the wilderness somewhere and his only access to the internet is via Starling, so that's great news!

I've heard of IP over pigeons, but using starlings is innovative.

Learn something new every day! I had never heard of RFC 1149[1] and was only familiar with Pigeonrank[2], another short-lived product.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149 [2] https://archive.google/pigeonrank/

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#114

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…

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinholdenplatt/2025/07/23/rus...

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#116

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?

My money is on a misconfigured switch or hub that allowed a broadcast storm that shut down all of their edge devices! Additional points for a user to cause the loop by plugging an rj-45 where they weren't supposed to, despite no warning or label telling them not to!

...in space?

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#117

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…

I would still bet against the Russians taking down all of Starlink. If they had a zero day that could do that, they'd save it for just before a big war.

But Russian low-intensity hybrid warfare, including infiltration and sabotage, is very real. Particularly in Europe and especially so in eastern Europe. There's a lot of nasty things going on in border areas that isn't widely reported.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#118
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wonder what they do for out of band on satellites. It's not like you can have a tech go out and reboot it or reinstall windows.

Their space infra is all disposable. Its GUGD.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#119
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a very technical root cause analysis you have there. Can you leave geopolitics out of it until it's confirmed?

Other social media networks may tolerate this but this is not HN worthy.

Post reply on HN