My terminal is pulling an update. Slowly... I would guess outage was in terminals associating with satellites properly
Yeah. Mine did a couple of reboots automatically in the last hour and now it seems solid again.
Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage
161–170 of 305 posts
Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
digging a bit deeper, apparently most damage is coming from irradiated material interacting with solar panels of satellites passing through the cloud. sounds like it'll work, just not immediately and not necessarily via an actual EMP.
Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage
#163Everyone on this thread is so smart. I don’t have anything to add except a funny story. My Starlink went out right when I was scheduled to join a meeting today at 2:15 CST.
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Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage
#164Amazon missed a huge pre-sale opportunity for their future sat net.
Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage
#165Pro-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.
Starlink still has infrastructure outside the satellites to run normal company stuff. If they screwed up something in their core routing system, or DNS, etc it could affect everything.
Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage
#166Pro-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.
Starlink has servers for the website and subscriber sites. Importantly, they have servers for controlling the satellite network. They also have multiple gateways for satellites to connect to the network.
A problem in their network would take down the sites, and maybe the control plane for satellites.
Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage
#167Curious 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.
If it is a hack there can't be that many suspects, just narrow it down to people/groups/countries that hate Elon Musk.
Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage
#168Curious 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…
Elon saw yesterday's article about The Promised LAN, and said "What if we connected that instead of the Internet...?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44661682#44663409
Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage
#169So, 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…
Get an employee to take the network down from the inside.
Either exploit existing employees or take years to seed an agent into the company.
State level persistent attacks are well funded and have long timelines.
Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Few big nukes are enough to take out all satellites. Um, no. Not even vaguely remotely. "Thousands of satellites" is a lot by historical human space standards, but compare that to the number of cars you see every day and then remember these are spread out over an area bigger then the surface of the entire planet. Don't be fooled by the simulation maps you can find online, where the satellites and tracks are shown t…
> Starfish Prime caused an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that was far larger than expected, so much larger that it drove much of the instrumentation off scale, causing great difficulty in getting accurate measurements. The Starfish Prime electromagnetic pulse also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 900 miles (1,450 km) away from the detonation point, knocking out about…
Yes, very good you're capable of a simplistic wikipedia search. Now I'd like you to try thinking about the paragraph you just linked for a moment: is "Hawaii", the "300 streetlights", "numerous burglar alarms", and a "microwave link" in the atmosphere (and on the ground, or indeed literally the ground) or in Earth orbit? If you read further, you'll find that the mechanism of generation involves the interaction of the gamma ray emissions with the atmosphere and Earth's magnetic field, that at 500km+ the effect are is reduced, and then find that in your example of Starfish Prime the primary damage to the satellites it affected was not due to EMP at all but rather because the test created radiation belts that damaged solar panels as satellites passed through. This would reduce design lifetime but isn't an immediate killer of everything. You'd need far more then a couple of nukes.
Of course, purposefully detonating nuclear weapons to create large scale NEMP effects might well still disrupt Starlink to the degree that it'd effect any piece of ground electronics, because the ground effects would be far, far worse. The satellite constellation could be ok enough to still be functional at reduced capacity, but if terminals and ground stations get toasted that's not immediately helpful. But that directly leads, again, to the fact that you're talking about LAUNCHING A NUCLEAR WAR ON THE ENTIRE WORLD here. No internet is going to be doing very well!
So yes: Starlink is pretty darn robust.