Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

The funny thing with the community status page is that stations can't report they're down when they're down :P There's big holes in individual stations' history and it looks normal.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/ paints a different picture

Perhaps due to geomagnetic storms, though stronger ones have not caused outages. Possibly just because.

thallium205• 10 months ago

Looks like they restored service.

Joel_Mckay3• 10 months ago

The solar flares in the 11-year cycle are at their peak activity.

There will be random outages for any space based equipment for awhile. =3

WJW• 10 months ago

Solar flares are not anywhere near their peak. The NOAA indicates the peak activity was actually in August 2024 with a total of ~245 "flux units". Activity for this month is predicted to be only around 167 units, so almost a full third down from the peak. Total numbers of sunspots is also down dramatically from their peak in August 2024.

See the graphs of https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/solar-cycle-progression for more info.

buyucu• 10 months ago

Everything I heard about Starlink indicates that it's very fickle and unreliable.

mrweasel2• 10 months ago

Really, everyone I've talked to has loved it. Granted they've all either live or work in remote areas where it has completely changed their lives. Those who live in remote areas can now actually work from home reliably and those who work on ships or in remote parts of world can now call home daily.

It's probably down to your expectations. Starlink won't replace a fiber connection, but if you only have a satellite connection or dial up, I can't see it being anything other than an improvement.

One concern I do have is if Starlink is down, there aren't really any backup. On the other hand I also only have one fiber connection at home. It's just that I could get a COAX hookup by tomorrow.

madaxe_again• 10 months ago

I use starlink and find it fast and reliable - far more reliable than any cabled connection I ever had elsewhere, and faster than the fibre that’s available around me, which is contended to hell and back. Yes, it’s gigabit in theory, but in practice you get 20Mb/s, and any time there’s a power outage, which is often, it’s down.

GJim• 10 months ago

The technology, or the business owner?

Because the fickleness and unreliability of the latter is a serious concern. Once other LEO constellations come online, who is going to stick with Starlink, knowing they may pull the plug at anytime on a whim of "Space Karen"?

mschuster91• 10 months ago

Once other LEO constellations come online

... it's time to "pick one's poison" again. It's either Amazon which is US based (and thus vulnerable to the same kind of political pressure that Starlink is) or it's IRIS2 (which is good if you're European, but might not be that optimal if US-EU relations go catastrophically sour).

On top of that, Kuiper isn't live yet (IIRC scheduled until 2026 for minimal coverage) and IRIS2 is only predicted for 2029 (and everyone who knows a thing about European cooperation projects knows that this is a seriously optimistic example - we don't even have a flight proven cheap rocket yet).

Gustomaximus• 10 months ago

Not my experience or people around me (rural area so it's common). WFH with no fibre and patchy mobile so starlink is a godsend.

The most common outage is a regular 3am reboot. Otherwise outages are infrequent and typically a few seconds.

Also the latency is surprisingly good, it's not fibre but can game FPS on it.

inglor_cz• 10 months ago

Maybe this is what you wanted to hear?

Because that is not the general experience at all. For a service whose necessary parts (the satellites) move in a rather hostile space environment, Starlink doesn't have that many outages.

I am on a Vodafone backbone buried optic cable here in CZ and yet there are a few unplanned short outages each month. Sometimes as short as 10 seconds, but working on a remote screen like my wife does, you definitely notice it.

sidcool• 10 months ago

They don't have a status page?

stanac2• 10 months ago

(Unrelated to main topic) Why is number of dead comments so high here? Do bots search for keywords that may increase views like "starlink" or something?

euLh7SM5HDFY• 10 months ago

I choose to believe HN flame wars are still 100% organic. It is "just" immigration from Reddit. Ars Technica also has more trolls in comments under any Musk related topics.

croisillon• 10 months ago

it's just 2 users, no?

stanac2• 10 months ago

You are right, 5 comments by 2 new users. But looking at "Why We Spiral", which has a similar number of comments, it has a single dead comment by an older account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45240146

duxup• 10 months ago

I see just 2 users with dead comments at the moment, one of them (a brand new account) just spammed a bunch of posts.

crossroadsguy• 10 months ago

NextDNS gaming category filter blocks starlink.com. Bizarre.

6510• 10 months ago

I would have thought one could design such thing without a single point of failure.

Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage

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