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Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

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Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#201

Post by lxgr »

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #92
mixdup wrote: 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.

I bet they have some pretty robust hardware watchdogs that allow rebooting, booting from firmware OTA etc. in case of local data corruption.

Here's a great talk on roughly this topic: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-hacking-yourself-a-satellite-rec...

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#202

Post by lxgr »

cyanydeez wrote: post #118
AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Each individual satellite, yes. But killing all of them at the same time, e.g. due to a bad software or configuration update, might be the end of the company.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#203

Post by acrophiliac »

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!

Digression ... you must be using "wilderness" in it's colloquial form, because technically, if he's in a cabin he can't be in wilderness. Federally designated wilderness areas don't allow permanent human habitation.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#204

Post by ReptileMan »

imoverclocked wrote: post #54
ReptileMan wrote: post #39

Wonder what will be the cost in lives in Ukraine. Communications outage could create a disorder in the worst possible time.

Russian aerial assets also use Starlink so it could similarly save lives.

How do they bypass the sanctions?

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#205

Post by gridder »

acrophiliac wrote: post #203
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!

Digression ... you must be using "wilderness" in it's colloquial form, because technically, if he's in a cabin he can't be in wilderness. Federally designated wilderness areas don't allow permanent human habitation.

The cabin is located in the wilderness, not part of it, and it’s real wilderness, not a wilderness designated area

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#206

Post by ben_w »

baq wrote: post #198
xoa wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> we don't know the capability of nukes designed specifcally to cause the Kessler syndrome in LEO for a few years

I wouldn't even consider a nuke for that. Energetic plasma ball resulting from nuke is not effective method to do so and any debris that survives the explosion isn't going to still be in LEO, but also no plausible deniability because it's obviously a nuke.

Try "we launched a satelite and it RUDed (honest we pinky swear it wasn't just a loose heap of ball bearings like it appears on radar) and now LEO is marginally more dangerous".

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#208

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

acrophiliac wrote: post #203
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!

Digression ... you must be using "wilderness" in it's colloquial form, because technically, if he's in a cabin he can't be in wilderness. Federally designated wilderness areas don't allow permanent human habitation.

Furthermore, the planet we are on cannot possibly be in space. Space is mostly empty, has no breathable atmosphere, there are no trees or grocery stores there, etc.; Earth is quite the opposite.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#209

Post by oceanplexian »

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…

A network of satellites gives you entirely new and exciting ways of taking your network offline, such as bricking them with a firmware update and no way to actually get up there and fix it.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#210

Post by AdamJacobMuller »

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.

I broadly agree with what you're saying, but, that's not the issue here.

They don't even have a dedicated status/outage page, afaik.

The website being down is a more classic problem. The outage probably increased traffic to their website by 1000x if not more and the infrastructure for the website simply couldn't cope.

Good lesson on keeping your status infrastructure simple and on something which is highly scalable.

Having a CDN where the main page of their site was 99% cached globally would have probably mitigated this issue.

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