Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage
starlink.comwhat's supposed to be inferred from the link? I only see the homepage.
Looks like they restored service.
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
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.
Indeed, we can't know the maxima for sure until passing through the entire peak prediction model period. The expectation of sun spot frequency and intensity only alluded to the average behavior rather than what we have partially observed in cycle 25 so far. Have fun =3
Was the website the only thing down?
This community Starlink Status page doesn't seem to show any outage: https://starlinkstatus.space/
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.
They don't have a status page?
(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?
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.
I see just 2 users with dead comments at the moment, one of them (a brand new account) just spammed a bunch of posts.
it's just 2 users, no?
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.
Everything I heard about Starlink indicates that it's very fickle and unreliable.
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"?
> 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).
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.
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.
And if you live a rural, mostly wooded area like I do, fallen trees are constantly taking out the fiber services for days at a time.
They aren’t buried? Or do the roots tear the fibre?
A lot of countries still uses poles for cables, and fiber. It's always super weird to see when you're from an area that buries everything except high voltage powerlines.
For areas with frequent earthquakes I think poles are preferred because it's easier to fix broken cables.
From the part of the Europe where I am from power lines are rarely buried, however fiber is universally buried so I haven’t even considered it could not be.
They’re not buried around here for the most part. I think the population density is just too low to justify the cost.
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.
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.
I would have thought one could design such thing without a single point of failure.
NextDNS gaming category filter blocks starlink.com. Bizarre.
Done
I like the Bladerunner reference in your about.
Yeah, but the Blade Runner Replicants lived longer than most FANG coders churn positions.
One of the best Sci-Fi movies of all time. =3
THE best.
same