SpaceX’s Starlink satellite-internet network suffered one of its widest disruptions on 24 July, knocking tens of thousands of users offline from roughly 3:20 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. Eastern Time. Crowd-sourced tracker DownDetector logged about 61,000 outage reports at the peak, while monitoring group NetBlocks said overall connectivity fell to just 16 % of ordinary levels. The blackout spanned North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, affecting individual consumers as well as airlines and emergency services that rely on the low-Earth-orbit constellation. Ukraine’s military said terminals went dark across the front line, underscoring the country’s dependence on the system for battlefield communications. Starlink acknowledged the problem in a post on X, saying it stemmed from “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.” Service was “mostly recovered” after about 2½ hours, Starlink vice-president of engineering Michael Nicolls said. Elon Musk also apologised, adding that engineers will “remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.” The outage is rare for Starlink, which serves more than six million subscribers in 140 markets and has become central to SpaceX’s revenue and to government and commercial customers. It came a day after T-Mobile began offering a satellite-text service that also uses Starlink, highlighting the growing criticality—and single-point vulnerability—of the network.