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Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

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Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#151

Post by modeless »

baq wrote: post #131
modeless wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe this is true. And of course detonating nukes in space would be an act of war against the whole world.

nukes optimized for EMP may be able to do this just fine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse

I'm aware of the existence of the EMP weapon concept. I doubt its effectiveness against modern satellites in LEO at long range.

That very article says "The damaging effects on orbiting satellites are usually due to factors other than EMP". Also "for equipment to be affected, the weapon needs to be above the visual horizon". Given how low Starlink orbits and the fact that they are dispersed evenly over the whole Earth, the number of weapons you would need to detonate just to ensure line of sight to every satellite at a range short enough to be effective is absolutely enormous.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#152

Post by asadotzler »

bogzz wrote: 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 too am in the wilderness and Starlink is my only broadband, but I was smart enough to keep my 1.5Mbps WISP connection (radio mounted 170' up one of my redwoods) so I'm still in good shape for basic communication, even some streaming and videoconferencing, though those aren't great this morning.

Also, after my Starlink terminal rebooted a few times on its own over the last hour or so, things are looking good again.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#153

Post by chrisstanchak »

dave_universetf wrote: post #50
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 g…

It's always a bad route that was introduced during a planned upgrade

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#154

Post by reaperducer »

LunaSea wrote: post #139
x______________ wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

A geopolitical reason could very well explain this "coincidence".

The parent's concern is with the "could" in your sentence.

Unlike other web sites, the people of HN used to pride themselves on presenting facts, not speculation. Rumors were left for places like Facebook and now Reddit.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#155

Post by [deleted] »

dmix wrote: post #146
ozten wrote: post #144

Pro-tip: Don't host your status / outage page on your own infrastructure. We learned this lesson the hard way at AWS with S3.

How would you host a status page on Starlink? Are there web servers that are only connected to a satellite connection in house or something? Or is this just speculation that's how their marketing website works.

[deleted]

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#156

Post by chrisstanchak »

0xffff2 wrote: post #35
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?

I'm hardly an expert, but it seems like usually stuff like this happens to major backbones because of a bad configuration being rolled out too fast. Maybe the pushed a bad DNS/BGP/ update to every satellite and/or ground station near simultaneously.

It just takes one

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#158

Post by asadotzler »

Symmetry wrote: post #104
rossdavidh wrote: post #61

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…

Yeah, Russia maanged to knock Viasat offline with hacking during the initial invasion. The original donated Starlinks were supposed to replace Viasat and SpaceX was surprised that they ended up being used on the front lines. Russia has certainly been trying to knock them out ever since.

If my memory is accurate, that didn't knock Viasat offline, it only made most of Viasat's customers unable to connect, but the network was just fine, only user routers were broken.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#159

Post by lxgr »

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?

They still have tons of ground-based infrastructure that has all the regular failure modes. I suspect the satellites also route IP traffic statically, and they only do so to a fixed set of ground gateways all operated by Starlink (compared to e.g. Iridium, which makes in-space switching decisions and can at least continue ongoing phone calls between two devices without actually needing a reachable ground gateway).

National telcos manage to take themselves out countrywide from time to time too, so I'd assume the same usual suspects apply: Routing problems, botched global configuration changes etc.

If anything, due to centralization, ubiquitous and effectively free connectivity, and centralization/automation of configuration changes, the blast radius of any given error or malicious action has probably been steadily increasing over the years.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#160

Post by 0xffff2 »

markasoftware wrote: post #98
0xffff2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what if the boot image itself isn't corrupted but rather there's other persistent data which causes the firmware to get stuck / bootloop? This is more or less what happened to the Mazda head unit firmware in the link I posted.

There are failsafe images that are fully self contained. I would hope that even Starlink satellites are engineered to a higher standard than an automotive head unit.
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