Starlink download speeds increase drastically after the glitch that brought its satellite Internet network down

Starlink Internet outages are not a common occurrence, and its network has barely gone down since SpaceX started launching the first Starlink satellites into orbit.

That is why the longest Starlink outage since its inception came as a shocker on Friday, July 25, when many of its six million users in the US or globally stayed without satellite Internet for at least 2.5 hours, and some quite a bit longer.

Starlink posted a global outage warning on its website for the first time, and resolved the issue fairly quickly on the same day for most. SpaceX apologized and clarified that the culprit was "key internal software services that operate the core network," potentially referring to the biggest ground network serving a satellite constellation ever built.

In the US, Starlink operates over 100 gateways with 150 antennas each, in order to eliminate dead spots and improve ping for remote users and rural communities. The gateway antennas are manufactured in Redmond, WA, and used to funnel the satellite Internet signal through the nation's robust fiber optic network, thus improving coverage, latency, and connection stability.

SpaceX is now upgrading those ground bases to prepare them for the orbiting of its V3 satellites that offer 10x the throughput of the current crop, or 1 Tbps. For comparison, the Starlink Mini dish maxes out at 100 Mbps and there's only one Performance dish that can take advantage of the gigabit speeds. SpaceX will start adding 60 Tbps of network capacity with each 2026 launch of V3 satellites, and a third generation of terrestrial gateways will have to be deployed to support it.

Unfortunately, Starlink's ground-based network can be a source of instability, and that's precisely what happened during the long outage. According to a SpaceX memo distributed to suppliers, a software patch sent to the Starlink gateways overloaded their hardware and the network stopped serving packets while the core update was working its way through the system.

While SpaceX served the usual set of excuses and promises that they have learned a lesson, Starlink users started noticing a rather pleasant development over the weekend. The post-outage Starlink download speeds increased by a factor of three or more for some users, indicating that the misfortunate update sent out to the gateways wasn't a bug fix, but rather a robust network upgrade indeed.