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Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

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Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#191

Post by ben_w »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #109
ben_w wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Unless Musk is outside the country, the outage started in the late morning [1]. If this happened at 3AM, your hypothesis would be more likely. [1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacexs-starlink-hit-by-major-out...

Hmm. It may be that I myself am too tired right now, but I'm afraid I don't follow the logic on that one?

But thanks for the link anyway.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#192

Post by ianburrell »

modeless wrote: post #151
baq wrote: post #131

Earlier 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…

Nukes produce lots of gamma and x-rays. On Earth, those are absorbed to produce the fireball. In LEO, some are absorbed by upper atmosphere to make EMP. In space, they are radiation.

Except for military satellites like GPS, most satellites aren't hardened to deal with that much radiation. My guess is that the range would be thousands of miles.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#194

Post by airspresso »

chasd00 wrote: post #77
dave_universetf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Messing up with BGP makes you feel alive, that’s for sure.

But hey, if you haven’t caused an incident yet, that just means you’re still in onboarding. Those SLA downtime budgets are there to be spent.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#195

Post by airspresso »

chrisstanchak wrote: post #153
dave_universetf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I thought it was always DNS

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#196

Post by hedora »

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…

I rebooted my terminal and I can’t tell for sure if it sees any satellites. It looks like it doesn't.

It says it didn’t, and it says the “which way is down” thing hasn’t converged. Occasionally, the signal to noise ratio light in the app goes gray which means It also rebooted itself.

Before the first reboot, 30% of pings went through. It’s almost like the azimuth or some other timely but cached data was corrupted.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#197

Post by airspresso »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #167
modeless wrote: post #58

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.

If it is a hack there can't be that many suspects, just narrow it down to people/groups/countries that hate Elon Musk.

I see what you did there

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#198

Post by baq »

xoa wrote: post #170
baq wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Starlink is pretty darn robust.

not saying it isn't. I was the evangelist of it in 2022 and seen the pentagon salivating at what they've seen and rightly so.

what it isn't is indestructible, though - and we don't know the capability of nukes designed specifcally to cause the Kessler syndrome in LEO for a few years. if I was China I'd have a project for this commissioned by Jan 2023.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#199

Post by guy2345 »

munchler wrote: post #179
almostdigital wrote: post #172

I'm posting this from my Starlink connection, been working fine here. I'm close to the arctic circle so maybe the polar orbiting satellites are not affected

What a great writing prompt! Would love to read read the rest of this as a short story. Any takers? Edit: Wow, that’s the fastest any of my HN posts have ever been buried. Still, as an old guy, I have to say it’s pretty awesome to be living in a future where polar satellites can keep someone in touch with the rest of civilization.

why would there be a rest to this

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#200

Post by airspresso »

supportengineer wrote: post #99
markasoftware wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same things have been said of eg the massive Facebook years ago. It was DNS, which affected service discovery across the whole org. The massive Roblox outage was also caused by service discovery failure (Consul). If your machines don't know which other machines to talk to, shit goes bad fast.

This happens enough that it seems like someone would have created a better alternative.

Everything has failure modes, the only difference is how hard they are to trigger
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