Sachin Shankar Yadav 
On August 18, 2025, there was a brief but widespread outage in the United States for SpaceX’s satellite internet service, Starlink. Over 40,000 users reported connectivity issues during the incident, which was one of the biggest disruptions for Starlink in recent months, according to the outage tracking platform Downdetector.
Around 11:23 PM IST (early Monday in the US), the outage started to receive a lot of reports, and in a short period of time, over 39,000 complaints were filed. About 60% of users reported a total loss of internet service, 38% reported a complete blackout with no services available, and 2% reported poor or sporadic reception. These issues were primarily divided into three categories.
With its extensive network of more than 6,750 satellites in low Earth orbit, Starlink offers high-speed internet access to both urban and rural locations that might not have access to traditional broadband infrastructure. Thousands of users in the US experienced internet blackouts and service interruptions as a result of the brief outage.
Thankfully, after the outage was reported, the service was restored rather quickly. The number of users reporting issues had drastically decreased by the time Downdetector’s data was last updated, suggesting that Starlink was operational again for the vast majority of impacted users.
This event demonstrates the difficulties and sporadic weaknesses in delivering large-scale satellite-based internet service, but it also highlights Starlink’s ability to effectively handle and recover from outages. Regarding this particular outage, neither SpaceX nor Starlink have yet to issue an official statement outlining the cause or the steps being taken to resolve it.
