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Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

starlink.com

261–270 of 305 posts

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Are you saying they are one big L2 domain? I love when devs talk about networking.

They said "hub"

Heh.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Imagine being that dev who pushed the bad patch - Crowdstrike but x100

Crowdstrike’s fuckup was at the company level.

Whoever is doing immediate global deployments and/or any prod deployments without verified testing is just wrong as a corporate culture.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#263

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

They're all the same satellites. It's actually impossible to have a satellite just orbit at the poles.

Not without using a LOT of fuel .. <3

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would exfiltrate any secret technology first, then do their best to burn the whole network. Potentially you could burn the constellation with reentry.

> Potentially you could burn the constellation with reentry Just put them into a spin with a strong propellant burn while compromising ground stations. Even if the fleet recovers, its lifespan will have been significantly reduced by the propellant expenditure.

Spin would be indeed the most problematic, but the Starlink satellites only have krypton hall thrusters. Very efficient but also very low thrust - you you could not actually significantly waste fuel this way even if you wanted to.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wondered how much energy could pass through some area 1000 miles away from the explosion, so I made some rough calculations.

Assumption: all energy of the nuclear explosion is radiation uniform in every direction.

The energy E would be spreading in a sphere with area 4*pi*R^2. Area A being a part of that sphere would capture E*A/(4*pi*R^2) of energy. So with:

  energy E = 209 PJ (Tsar bomba for an extreme example)
 
  area A = 1 m^2

  radius of the sphere R = 1000 miles (1609 km)
That would give:

  2.09 * 10^17 J * 1 m^2 / (4 * pi * (1.609 * 10^6 m) ^ 2) = 6.4 kJ
So at the distance of 1000 miles an 1 m^2 object would be exposed to 6.4 kJ of radiation. I don't know how destructive would that be. That energy would be equivalent to 6 seconds of sun irradiating a 1 m^2 area above the Earth's atmosphere, but of course sun's radiation is less dangerous (very little gamma/x-ray), and all of that radiation would be almost instant.

From what I'm reading about high-altitude nuclear testing, it can cause artificial radiation belts around the Earth (composed of high-energy electrons). I think that may be more dangerous to satellites at distances like 1000 miles (or at any distance) than the immediate gamma/x-ray radiation.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#267
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it 1,5 Mb and radio mount on a tower I would more guessing toward the side of PTP line of sight Link or such Mikrotik, Unifi instead of cellular cradlepoint.

In the US: Ubiquiti, Cambium, probably not Tarana because that's way too expensive for a 1.5Mbps sub. Mikrotik radios are fairly rare here, but the routers and switches are everywhere.

Thats interesting ! Mikrotik routers and switches are very cheap, I wonder why they one product line is extremely common but the radios are rare rather than roughly equivalent spread ?

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#268

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?

Kessler syndrome?

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#269
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.

Incredibly, Americans still think they have any chance of teaching Russia or China "manners". The hubris of a decadent empire.

And of course, they have to downvote to hell. They need to keep the illusion that the US is still the most powerful military, the most powerful economy, and that AI will save their hegemony.

Really sad.

Re: Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

#270
post #236
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Russians use Starlink too, saw a video on Kiev Independent that had a Ukranian drone team take out a Starlink dish atop a Russian bunker.

I imagine it is illegal for Starlink to not geofence service to prevent Russians using it for exactly that purpose. Sanctions still exist, after all.

Yes, in Kursk, maybe. However this is in Ukraine.
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